


31 Fan Statements

by Surgeworks



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, If you like any of these please rec them to your friends, M/M, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Warning: some parts of this are deliciously gay, all standard warnings that pertain to the podcast apply here, many more parts are scary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:40:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 31
Words: 81,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27355144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Surgeworks/pseuds/Surgeworks
Summary: A series of statements concocted as if written and recorded at the Magnus Institute, one for each day of October. A little late, yes, I know.
Comments: 19
Kudos: 16





	1. Succubus

**Author's Note:**

> Thirty-one statements I wrote. There are two (in one case, three) statements for each Power. While in most cases it's obvious which Power is at play, some are blended (a "main" Power and a pinch of another Power), and you are encouraged to try and figure out which is which. You are also invited to leave your own post-statement in the comments in the voice of Gertrude Robinson or Jonathan Sims, if you like. All content warnings that pertain to the podcast are standard here, including but not limited to: gore, ocular trauma, stalking, kidnapping, claustrophobia, astraphobia, entomophobia, nyctophobia, pyrophobia, death, murder, surgery/invasive procedures, isolation, drug addiction, gaslighting, rape (mentioned) and child death (mentioned). It's here to scare you, not to upset you.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Keaton Whitfield, regarding a high school friend. Original statement given July 31st, 2014. Audio recording by the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
> 
> Statement begins.

Your hormones can blind you to a great many things. That goes double for when you're a teenager, and already kind of stupid before the hormones enter the equation. In retrospect, thinking about it now, it seems obvious that something was off. But I don't entirely blame myself for being fooled by Sue.

Sue was a girl who transferred to my high school a quarter of the way into my senior year. And she was _beautiful_. When she walked into a room, no joke, it changed the entire atmosphere. Physically, she seemed to be flawless. Long blonde hair, kept straight down her back, perfect cheeks and eyebrows, magnetic eyes and full lips...her figure was a perfect hourglass, and she was tall enough to stand over the heads of most girls, but just short enough not to threaten any of the guys. Naturally, she was a bit shy and awkward, and needed a lot of help adjusting, and everyone who saw her was happy to give it. Somehow, it was my own little circle of friends she ended up absorbed into, our table she gravitated towards.

Back then, it was me, Jason, Blaire, Phillip, Keisha, Tommy, and Christine. And, of course, Sue. I remember it was Christine that had brought her over to our lunch table in an effort to include her, and while at first her awkwardness persisted, she melded in well enough. Our friends became her friends. And she was great, a real sweet girl, very kind and thoughtful, and nowadays I wish I'd seen what an act it was and cut her skank eyes out with one of those shitty plastic spoons they give you to eat with in school.

For the first month, everything went smoothly, with no hint that anything was out of the ordinary except that every single guy in the school was nursing a huge crush on the same girl, and every last girl who found out about it got jealous, though it never ended up making a scene. After the second month, though, Blaire started to get sick.

That wasn't surprising; it's a school, illnesses spread like wildfire, especially once the seasons change. She took some time out of school, and a week later, Keisha got sick. She went home too...and then, a few days later, Blaire still wasn't back in class yet. That was kind of surprising. Blaire was a good student, and she'd missed school before, but never stayed out this long. Some rumors started to circulate that she'd cheated on a test and gotten suspended.

It turned out to be nothing. Blaire, at least, showed back up in the week before autumn harvest break. I remember being relieved that she was okay, and not suffering pink-eye or bronchitis or cheating whore syndrome, as an annoyed Phillip had put it. That one surprised me. Phillip and Blaire had used to date in their sophomore year, but as far as I know their breakup was amicable and it hadn't stopped them being friendly to one another when we all sat together or hung out after class. I didn't understand where this bitterness had come from.

When Christmas came around, nobody made anything of it that they hadn't heard from Keisha or Blaire, since everyone had to put a lot of attention towards their families during the holidays. But Keisha was the only one to come back in January, and it eventually got out that Blaire had transferred schools over the holidays. By now it was 'common knowledge' that she'd cheated on a test and been threatened with expulsion, thus explaining the move. The rest of us that were left were happy to discuss it, Sue included. It's obvious now, looking back, that it was all horse shit. It baffles me that none of us noticed it was always her to turn the conversation around to how untrustworthy Blaire had been.

February rolled around, and Keisha began to look a little haggard. She didn't sit with us as often, and she seemed quieter than ususal, stressed out. Valentine's Day came and went, and she stopped coming to school. The rumors started to fly, of course, that she'd been harshly rejected by her crush, and was having an emotional breakdown and in therapy. The rumors got worse, with blood having been discovered on her pillow, and then everyone was saying she'd started cutting herself. Everyone thought that her parents had been the ones to report that, but...I can't remember anyone ever confirming it. Nobody questioned it when she never came back, just assuming she had dropped out. I was wrong for that...we were childhood friends, and looking back, I barely registered any concern for her. As if she had just slowly drifted out of our little circle and her problems weren't mine anymore.

That left Christine as the only girl in our dwindling friend group--besides Sue, of course. For the record, I had been nursing a massive crush on Christine since starting high school. It should have bothered me more when she went missing--actually went missing, with newspaper headings and everything, no excuses or masks--and yet I had hardly any reaction at all to it. There was only room in my head for Sue now, who had replaced her in my mind and heart as the sweetest, most beautiful, most deserving girl in the world...

And to make things even better, I was starting to think she liked me back, that Sue. She always seemed to have a cute little smile my way when we passed each other in the hall, her shoes were constantly bumping mine under the table, and she would even call me in the afternoons and evenings. Being the horny teenage guy that I was, I was falling for her hard and on daily and nightly basis. She made my heart flutter and my pants tighten, and my focus started to slip so much that my grades followed suit.

My ties with my male friends had started to wither somewhere along the way, of course. A gradual weakening of our relationships, while everyone was focused on the drama with the girls. We just didn't seem to like each other as much as we used to, and it was Sue--and our respective blinding crushes on her--that was holding the group together now. So when Jason started to sit away from Sue, and it got to the rest of us that she had asked him on a prom date and been cruelly rejected, it made it easy for us to turn on him. I remember Phillip chewing him out in the hall, and I called him up one afternoon to get on his ass. So he started sitting away from us at lunch, on the far opposite side of the cafeteria. None of us bothered calling him back over or paying much attention to him, which made it easy to forget him, so that he could go missing without any of us noticing. This was around the same time Tommy had started skipping school, of course, and eventually just stopped showing up altogether as well. Something about getting in with the wrong crowd, and doing drugs...

And if I envied Jason for catching Sue's affection, it was nothing to how jealous I was of Phillip 'comforting' her, the sly bastard, and they had a short fling that lasted about two weeks. And, of course, he stopped coming to school once it was over, as well...

I know it will be easy to deride me, hate me even, for failing to notice what was going on. But I was young, and stupid, and I believe Sue, or whatever the thing calling itself Sue was, knew that. Knew it was the case for every kid around her. So, when it was just me and her at that table then, and my birthday arrived and passed...you wouldn't believe how ecstatic I was. I was right! It was me, it had always been me, I was always the one she had truly loved, and would I mind too terribly letting her come over to my house one evening...

It would've been my first kiss. We were sitting there on my bed, my parents weren't home, and our hands were atop one another on the sheets. She was leaning in, and I leaned too, she closed her eyes, and I closed mine...and if I hadn't opened them, or had been a single second late, I'd have been eaten, I'm sure of it. To this day I still don't know why I opened my eyes. It wasn't some Eureka moment, I hadn't realized anything of worth. I was just nervous, and my eyes opened...and I saw all those teeth, and the tongue was too long...I jerked back, and in that moment, my body took over. I grabbed my desk lamp from my bedside table and hit her across the face with it. She had tried to hide it, taken my moment of shock to bend her mouth back into a human shape, but she wasn't quite fast enough, and I saw the teeth she was hiding just before the light bulb broke against her cheek. She screamed at me, asked me what the hell I was doing. I aimed at her with the lamp again.

At that point, I guess the ploy was up, and she fled down the stairs. I followed her--I don't know why, it wasn't like I was suddenly into killing monsters, I could've just locked the door--but she surprised me in the kitchen, came at me and went for my neck. She bit down, and she was so much stronger than she should've been. But when her teeth were sunk into me, that was the moment I grabbed a kitchen knife from the stand behind me, and plunged it into her neck. She let go.

Sue was sitting there, a monster with my blood around her jaws, and I got to stabbing. I could feel the spell breaking, and suddenly she wasn't gorgeous anymore. Suddenly she was the ugliest, most disgusting thing I could ever remember seeing, and I didn't stop until she was still, well after in fact.

The body was burned, of course, and left no skeleton. I cleaned up the kitchen before my parents got home, and told them a big dog had bitten me on the way home from school, and they had me looked at by a doctor. Everyone seemed to miss Sue, though during the last days of the school year, I was pleased to find that not everything I heard about her was as glowing as it had been before. In the months following my graduation, I did my digging, and of course, none of my friends had dropped out or transferred. They were all dead, eaten. Along with their parents, in most of the cases. I'm the only one left.

I still haven't actually had my first kiss, even though I'm enrolled for university in the fall. If I never do kiss a girl...I won't be surprised. The entire experience has left me a little at odds with women and the idea of sex, really. Maybe one day. And maybe one day, I'll be able to let go of this guilt. Guilt that it was me that survived, guilt that I never noticed what was happening to my friends.

I'm sorry. That's all you should need from me, and I really want to go drink now.

_Statement ends._


	2. Stalker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Molly Porter, regarding a stalker. Original statement given February 12th, 2012. Audio recording by the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
> 
> Statement begins.

It all started with my diary, two years ago.

It's funny how stressful a diary is, for something that's supposed to relax you. You can make fun of it all you want, but when you can't afford counseling and it's all you've got, writing in a diary is therapeutic. Just being able to organize your thoughts, and then look at them from the outside as many times as you need to. All the same, it's private stuff. And when you think someone's been snooping, it's funny to everyone but you.

I was twenty-two back then, and still lived with my parents. And I had trudged up the steps to my bedroom, tired and bad-tempered from work, when I found my diary on my desk, clasp unlocked. And I'll tell you, I went ballistic. That was just what I needed after dealing with rude, entitled people all day, was to come home and find someone had had themselves a laugh looking through my deepest secrets. I stormed downstairs and made this huge scene, demanding to know why Mum and Dad hadn't stopped my little brother from playing around in my room, and of course he denied it. They totally blew me off, got on my case about leaving my things strewn around and then kicking up a fuss. Mum was so condescending about it, too, like I should've just been more careful instead of expecting privacy. Dad just dismissed me, said I probably left in a hurry and forgot to lock it and hide it.

Now, for the record, I'd had this diary since I was fifteen, and still hadn't filled it up. I have always kept it hidden out of the way and firmly locked anytime that I use it. Every. Last. Time. Never _once_ have I left it out for others to read. It was making me so mad, it was obvious someone had been through my things, and after I got shouted down, I went and double-checked to make sure it hadn't been vandalized, then locked it and hid it again. I also got out the key to my room that'd been hanging on a shoelace over my mirror for the last few years and took it with me to work the next day, making sure both my diary and my room door were locked before I left for work.

Of course, it didn't do any good. When I got home that day, I made sure to thoroughly check things--my diary was where it should have stayed all day, but it was unlocked again, and laying at an angle. I got downright furious, and then I got nervous. Someone was looking into my personal stuff, my most secret stuff, and either Mum had had a key made when I wasn't aware, or they were getting in through the window. I somehow doubted my little brother, who was nine, was ambitious enough to climb up through my window from the second story, he's never been all that gutsy. So, was someone else doing it? I remember looking at my window and biting my lip, and then checking it. Still firmly shut, no signs of damage, and still squeaked when I opened it. Still, I decided I'd use some of my next paycheck getting a window alarm.

That didn't work either, of course. Came home next week, diary was still unlocked, and no window alarm tripped, and by now I was starting to get seriously freaked out. I had a stalker, there was no other word for it. I remember checking the diary thoroughly that night, just to see if whoever was doing this had written anything, like some kind of creepy romantic-from-afar, but nothing. This went on for a few more days, and trying to ignore it...well, I didn't do too well. I had my usual stresses, and my usual way of winding down had been taken from me. I couldn't write in it again, because whatever I wrote would get seen. I stopped bringing it up to the rest of my family. They weren't being helpful at all, and it took me a while to figure out what to do. That was when I remembered something I'd read online a while back, about some neurotic woman talking to her therapist. How she had kept freaking out every day about whether she'd left her hairdryer on and it was making her late for work when she turned back to get it in the car. So she took her therapist's suggestion and just started bringing the hairdryer to work with her. It seemed like it'd work well enough for me. So, I tried that with my diary one day. Brought it to work with me in a little pink book bag from my school days, which I kept stuffed in the cabinet under the register.

It did a lot for my peace of mind, for about the first half of the day. I had total access to it, could check it any time of the day I wanted. I figured no one at work cared about my little diary, or if they did, they obviously weren't going to out themselves with me on the clock. But then...about halfway through my shift, I started to get this weird feeling. You know, like when you can feel someone staring at you? I remember getting fed up with it and turning to ask the cashier, Brian, what he wanted, but he wasn't looking at me. When I spoke up, he looked up and got all confused. Mind you, Brian wasn't the kind of guy to act coy. Very blunt, a big flirt, but too big of a stoner to get most girls. I had briefly considered him for being my stalker and then crossed him off the list. Besides, we'd worked the same shift for long enough that it would be weird for him to start breaking into my home from out of nowhere.

And it kept up like that for the rest of my shift. This prickling feeling on the back of my neck, like someone was burning holes in me with their eyes, even when I went to the bathroom. It only took me until I got home to figure out why. I had this sense of dread when I walked up the stairs to the second floor and got my door open, and I screamed bloody murder when I saw my room. I shrieked for Mum until she stormed up there, and her jaw dropped like mine did. My room was an absolute mess. All the drawers and cabinets pulled open, clothes everywhere, the mirror on the floor with a big crack in it, even the beams under the bed taken out. It was insane. Even my parents woke up after that and took it seriously.

Of course, I say that now. Back then, I was going back and forth on whether they were faking the shock. The odds were astronomical that someone could've torn through my room like a tornado without them hearing it. I remember thinking that it might've been my dad, convinced that I was seeing some boy, or doing drugs, or...or maybe there was a creepier reason. It's stupid, I know. But after that, I started keeping a taser and pepper spray on me at all times, only removing them when I slept, and that was to put them under my pillow. I burned the diary. I don't know why it had become the fixation of whoever or whatever was obsessing over it like they were, but I figured it was more trouble than it was worth at this point.

But the paranoia didn't stop. The feeling of being watched, day in and day out, didn't stop. It was a constant thing now, at home, at work, on the streets, in the pubs...it went on for weeks and weeks. It was always with me, and I hated it. It got the worst at night, when even buying curtains and covering the window didn't kill the vulnerability I felt. I started to get jumpy and I was losing a lot of sleep. So eventually, I decided there was only one thing for it: I was moving out.

Mum and Dad put up a fuss, of course, saying it was stupid and dangerous and I couldn't afford it, but by this point, I didn't trust them enough to see any other option. I didn't trust anyone. Even my little brother. I regret it now. I mean, I think they've been alright since I left, but just striking out and leaving them to the mercies of whatever had started with me...

But it didn't leave me alone. I made sure to tell no one where I was going, I double checked my phone and call histories, I ran background checks. I made sure to move further away than was strictly necessary, and yeah, it meant I had to quit my job, but I had enough saved up to hold me over until I could get a new one closer.

It only bought me a couple days. No, my place was never trashed again like it was that one time, but there were always signs. A sheet left a bit wrinkled, curtains pulled apart, the television on the wrong channel, the things in the fridge rearranged. It was rare that something was ever so out of place that anyone would notice but me, but on the occasions something was, I called the police. They've stopped responding to my calls, now. I don't blame them when no one's ever found around my property, there's never any sign of forced entry, and there's no DNA on my things but mine.

It got to the point where I'd almost been ready to beg whoever it was to just kill me and dump my body in a ditch already, just so I didn't have to suffer like this. I've moved several times, and it always finds me, always. I've lost jobs, can't make friends, my family are worried sick. I've been living like this for two years. And I came here because...because it's finally gotten worse.

Just when I've started to almost get used to living with a ghost who stares at me night and day, something changes. They...they called me.

Well, I think they called me. You see, I've been getting calls lately from a blocked number. The thing is, I've never blocked anyone. This is my fourth year with this phone, and the only people who've ever contacted this number before are my mum, dad, and a few select friends. I've never blocked anyone before, I've never had a reason to. But I'm sure it's not a mistake. I know that whatever is after me is on the end of that line. And I don't know why that has me so scared. Maybe this means it's finally gotten tired of the games, and it wants to make it even worse, take away one more thing that's belonged to me up until now. I haven't answered, not yet.

I don't expect you to be able to help me, but it was worth a try. Maybe you have someone on file who deals with peeping tom specters and the like. You've got my number now, so...if it turns out there's something you can tell me...well, I won't hold my breath.

But I want to leave now. I've gotten used to this presence, but it feels worse here, a lot worse. ...I'll be going now.

_Statement ends._


	3. Floor 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Riley Barret, regarding an investigation of a residential building. Original statement given December 4th, 2013. Audio recording by the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
> 
> Statement begins.

So, this happened to me and my friend Bonnie when exploring a block of flats in Addington. Me and Bonnie, we were really into a YouTube career at that time, and we had a big focus on spooky stuff. Not necessarily the paranormal, because we lacked any intensive equipment or editing software, it was more just talking about stuff into a mic. You know, superstitions and legends we could look up, creepypastas, unsolved murders. This was the first time we'd ever actually tried to drive out to have a look at something, and we didn't even really know what we were looking for. Mostly, we were just looking for really tall buildings, because we wanted to look at the whole 'thirteenth floor' superstition. It's not like we actually expected to stumble on hauntings or anything. Since it was closeby, we found a place that wasn't out of the way, or too expensive for us. Just some cheap little residential house, is all.

We found one that didn't mind our poking around, but the landlady warned us that the lift was currently undergoing maintenance and to please wait. I was kind of surprised by how easy it was, to be honest, we could've been murderers for all she knew, but she just asked us to leave the tenants alone, or she'd have to call someone to come get us. Then she left us to our devices, and we kind of just wandered around. Turns out there was a den just off the main office, and sure enough, there was a sweaty maintenance man fiddling around with an open button panel and all the wires underneath. He got up when we approached, and mentioned he was almost finished, and asked if we could use the stairs to get where we needed to go until then. I was prepared to say yes, but Bonnie asked if the stairs would take us to the thirteenth floor, and the man got kind of...nervous? He asked why we wanted to go up there, and before we could answer, he jerked his head towards the landlady's office and asked if she had sent us, and we said no. He shuffled for a bit before telling us to be careful, and that it was just 'a weird place...up there'.

Well, now we were definitely going up there. We asked if it was dangerous, and he kind of seemed to hesitate, and then said 'it could be', and I remember rolling my eyes, wondering what the hell _that_ meant. He then asked that, if we were really serious about going up there, if we might look for his assistant, Julian, as he still hadn't come back from his check of the floor. That was when I started to get a little off-put, and asked what he was doing up there and how long he'd been gone. He blew it off, said he was probably just smoking a blunt, but that he really needed help on the next assignment, so he needed him to come down soon. We agreed to look for him if he'd let us take the lift up to floor 13.

So that was that, and as soon as he was done, he opened the doors and shooed us in. He had the weirdest look on his face when the doors were closing us in, like he was watching someone be sent off to war. Bonnie got a little shivery when the doors closed, she's always been a bit claustrophobic, so I told her we could take the stairs back down if she liked. And then, there was the button, right in front of us, labeled '13'. Surprising, really. The others we'd checked had the thirteenth floor inaccessible except by a special staircase on the twelfth if it was the top floor or the roof, or just had it read 'out of order' if it wasn't. We pressed it, and waited.

At first, it was just standard stuff, you know, that feeling of being dragged upwards, and gravity resisting, making it feel like your spine and organs are pulling downwards instead? That increased as the lift sped up, and...it didn't stop. Not the lift, I mean, the feeling. It intensified, and kept doing so, even when the lift had reached a level speed. It got worse and worse, and I felt sick, like my insides were going to get caught on something and get left behind. Bonnie was huddling close, and I think she felt the same.

You know they say one of the signs of a heart attack is an 'impending sense of doom'? I don't know what the hell that means exactly, but I feel like I got close enough in that lift. It was a very specific sensation, but the only way I know how to describe it is...is like being pulled into a maw. I felt like we were being pulled into some hungry beast's maw. It's kind of like that sensation when you're a kid in the back seat of a car, and your parents drive into a long, dark tunnel, it's like that feeling, amped up from discomfort to this quiet sort of dread. And after that, well, the light started to fail, which _really_ heightened that sensation.

It didn't just blow all at once, it started to buzz a bit, and flicker almost imperceptibly, before it started to dim bit by bit. It would hover at half-brightness, then go down to nothing, and then back on. Bonnie and I looked at each other and got our phones out and turned on the torches. The light started going in and out, faster, and faster, and it was exactly like going through those tunnels again, with the bulbs in the tunnel ceiling shining down, light illuminating the windows and my parent's faces each time we passed one, flashes of light and darkness going by so quickly...and then one time it went all the way dead, and stayed that way. Not that the lift had stopped, we were still moving, very fast. I remember thinking that we'd been rising for way too long, and I'd been keeping an eye on the numbered lights up top, trying to ground myself. It had taken us so long to pass each floor, much longer than it should've at the speed we were going. We had just passed floor eleven, and were passing floor twelve in darkness. It seemed to take forever, and then finally, the lift started to slow. We'd been in darkness just long enough that when we finally stopped, and the light came back on, it almost blinded us. The lift doors opened, and we were finally there. We traded out the torches on our phones for the cameras, and stepped out.

The whole place was off-putting right from the start. It was your typical flat hallway, but the walls and ceiling were painted white, and the carpets on the flooring were grey. Almost as soon as we stepped out of the lift, it closed behind us, and a man's voice rang out, asking 'Who's there? Who's there?'. Bonnie and I looked at each other, and she answered back 'Is that Julian? We've come to get you!' but there was no answer. Walking forward a bit, I added that his boss had asked us to come find him, but still nothing. It occurred to me just then that I couldn't tell where the the voice had come from, what direction, except that it wasn't from behind us. There was a slight echo to the voices, the unnamed one and ours. Bonnie and I didn't really have any choice but to go forward.

The hall was long and lined with doors, and there was a window at the end of it. We went along all the doors, knocking and asking for Julian, but never got any answer. I remember we got all the way to the window before we realized the hall bent to the right, with everything so white I'd been unable to see it. I also tried to look out the window, but I couldn't see anything below. I thought I was looking at the sky outside, but I couldn't be sure if those were clouds or not.

We rounded the corner, and it was more of the same. Eventually we started trying to open the doors, since there was enough of them that it felt like wasting time not to check inside. We didn't expect them to open, of course, not without keys, and they didn't. It was so eerie. This was definitely not a maintenance area, but it felt like there was no one here. There wasn't a speck of dust anywhere, but there also wasn't any sign of life. Down the next corridor, there was another bend, this time to the left, but Bonnie wanted to go back and check the other doors, so we turned back the way we came, and I saw immediately that there was something wrong. The lift wasn't there at the end of the corridor anymore. It was just another window. Neither of us said anything for a moment, before I weakly said "That's...not right." Bonnie didn't respond.

I took her free hand and, still recording with my camera, started dragging her down the way we had first come, back when it had just been a single L-shaped corridor. Told her it was no use trying to double back on ourselves and to just go forward. We...basically continued what we'd been doing up until then, trying to focus on finding this Julian guy and not on how this place was obviously not a normal space. White walls, dark floors, doors that didn't open, and windows to nowhere. I tried to stick close to Bonnie. It felt like every time we weren't hanging on one another, we were always a bit further apart than we'd intended to be. I remember almost panicking when I turned back to talk to her at one point, and she was almost all the way at the other end of the hall. After that I just grabbed onto her free hand and kept it.

There were weird noises while we traveled. I remember passing through a few corridors where we heard the ticking of a clock, and it would get louder and louder, but still none of the doors we tried would open, and we just had to keep going. We were still calling Julian every once in a while, asking for him to show himself if he was able. We passed another corridor where there were these...squeaking sounds, like a gurney being wheeled somewhere, or screws being loosened from their fixings. It unnerved the hell out of us, and we passed that corridor really quickly.

It wasn't all a straight path, either. As much as we wanted to just keep moving forward and never back, there were dead ends, and we'd have to. It was never the same going backwards as it was forwards. After the first time this happened, certain doors started becoming unlocked. Some led to more corridors, which we only took if we were presented with a dead end. Some led to rooms, which we searched, with Bonnie holding the door open and me investigating. Julian wasn't in any of them, and he had yet to answer any of our calls, nor had we heard any other voices since. If there were other people up here, they weren't showing their faces. But _something_ was up there with us, some kind of presence. I don't know if it was something watching us from out of sight, or if the place itself was alive. I'm tempted to think the latter; whenever we'd search a room and leave again, I felt a shudder run through me, and I felt as though a shadow had just passed over me. Like it was getting frustrated that we weren't falling down enough to become trapped anywhere.

I had started to see things out of the corner of my eye, too, but never clearly enough to pipe up about it. I was not about to lose myself panicking about stalking shadowy figures when I couldn't prove that, and it would only scare Bonnie worse. We both eventually passed a hall where we could see a cracked window at the end of it. We kept moving immediately, not even bothering to check closer. We both knew something bad would happen if we got near it. More doors were opening, too, and opening onto new things. One opened on a dark hallway, which we closed. One opened up to show a roomful of blank canvases; another showed a room covered in the dark grey carpeting instead of paint. Another opened onto a room with parts of the walls busted in. That gave us a bad feeling too, so we closed it. At one point, Bonnie opened a door to find a supply closet, where a bucket was catching some fluid dripping from a crack in the ceiling, which explained the latest noise. We left it alone.

If the clock on my phone was right, we had been investigating this place for about an hour when we finally found Julian the maintenance assistant. We went uneasily down a corridor where a light was dimming and brightening, like it had been in the lift. Bonnie paused us near a door, straining her ear. I couldn't hear anything, but she dragged me closer, and pressed her ear to the door. She said she could hear breathing. We both started knocking on the door, calling for Julian, and I definitely heard a yelp and a whimper. We tried to get the door open, and a hoarse voice from inside screamed for us to leave him alone. We kept trying to open the door, but it was blocked. Not locked, blocked, I could turn the knob and rattle it, but it wouldn't open...and Bonnie eventually pointed out that I was trying to open it the wrong way. Unlike every other door in the place, this door opened outward, not inward. So I pulled it open, and behind it was...another door. This one _did_ open inward, and was locked firmly. It also felt like someone was pressed against the other side, keeping it closed.

If this was Julian, he was in a panic, determined not to let us in, and we tried for several minutes to convince him to. Eventually I yelled over his crying that if he didn't believe we were here to help, he could have my phone and call for it himself. I slid it under the crack in the door, and there was silence for a few minutes. It was still recording, if I hadn't accidentally turned it off. Eventually, we heard static and garbled noises, which...concerned me, and then Bonnie's phone started ringing. She answered it, since it was my phone calling, and spoke to him, and confirmed that the maintenance man had sent us to come get him, or 'rescue' him, as she put it. He finally opened the door a crack and peered at us. After a few more reassurances, he came out, brandishing a pair of pliers of all things, and we backed off. He looked like a mess, I'll tell you that. He was wearing the same type of coveralls the maintenance man downstairs had wore, but his breathing was ragged, his hair was disheveled, and his clothes, face, and hair were all smudged with what looked like white paint. His eyes were puffy and red, and he had bruises along his forearms and hands. He was the scariest thing we'd seen in the place, honestly, but it was obvious he was more scared than hostile. I got my phone back from him, and we told him to take one hand each of ours so we could stay together. After that, it was time to go, everyone agreed. As I said it, I felt myself shudder--or maybe it was the corridor shuddering around me. We honestly had no idea which way to go to reach the lift back down, or whatever other exit there might be, so we just started walking...very...quickly.

It wasn't wind that I felt, but it was definitely some sort of...movement? Everyone felt it, and as we power-walked, then jogged, then ran down hallway after hallway, turning corner after corner, it felt like the place was rushing us out. We ran across a corridor with another dimming light, and I stopped and ran us down that one, and at the next bend, I saw it--the lift! The lights were dimming all around us and when we got to it, we all frantically pressed the open button and jammed ourselves inside. We closed it, pressing the ground floor button. And I swear to you, the last thing I saw before the door closed, was a shadow coming down the hall from the bend at the end. And then, we were descending. It started slowly at first, but very quickly, the light blew--not dimmed, it blew out completely. And at the same instant, we started falling fast, way too fast, definitely out of control. The numbered lights atop the door frame had gone out, and we were screaming, holding onto each other for dear life, and with this great awful _crash_ , we hit the ground. We weren't injured at all, but we were wet. The moment we'd come to a sudden halt, some sort of clear liquid had splattered over us from the seams in the walls. Then after a moment, the door opened, and we all ran out. We left, and Julian ran off as soon as he hit the parking lot. But I looked back as we fled, and even though the landlady's head was pointed down, her eyes focused on some paper, not even acknowledging us...she was also looking at me. I don't know how, even though she couldn't be, I could feel her gaze, her attention, on me, like she was glaring right at me.

I don't know what happened to the maintenance workers there, or anyone else, but Bonnie and I are fine. We still do the spooky stories show on YouTube, but it's not like we ever uploaded anything. You know, I said we had been in there for about an hour when we found Julian, and we'd been recording for that entire time. But I haven't been able to look at the footage, because it's covered in static and the noise is all distorted. I haven't been able to upload it to anything to test if it's the same across the board, either, because despite what my clock had said, there were twenty-six and a half _hours_ of footage. No way we were in there that long. Hell, my phone shouldn't even hold a quarter of that much information. I'll leave it with you, see if you've got any further luck with it. I've wiped it of anything sensitive, so don't worry, there's no porn on there. I needed a new one anyway.

I don't have any explanations for what happened, and I know I haven't got much in the way of proof, either, but I feel like we were lucky to escape. Like it had to be that exact moment, or we'd never have made it out, and dollars to doughnuts the maintenance guy wouldn't have either. So...thanks for listening to my story, I guess. If that's all you need, I'll go now.

_Statement ends._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, boss. About the statement from Riley Barret, I've just gotten back from doing follow-up, and I wanted to tell you all that I'd found out. I was able to get into contact with the electricians contracted to work at that time. Neither of them would speak to me, of course, and one of them definitely had PTSD, and their company told me they'd quit and so couldn't access any records of possible similar encounters. I _was_ able to get in contact with the hospital that admitted Riley Barret after the experience, though, and there was something curious. With the way that statement went, I expected the liquid mentioned at the end to be water, or at a stretch, bile. But no, the doctor who worked him over confirmed that his face and hair had been flecked with trace amounts of cerebro-spinal fluid. It caused a real panic for them at the time they worked on him, so you'd think he'd remember it. Go figure. I'm just about to head out and see if I can find any traces of it in the lift at the residential building he had the experience in. See you.


	4. Influencer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Officer Lexie Moore, regarding investigations made into substances sold online. Original statement given August 29th, 2018. Audio recording by the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
> 
> Statement begins.

By now you're probably familiar with Section 31. Officially, an article protecting information that could damage a case if it went public. Informally...shorthand for a group of officers told to keep hush-hush about weird stuff that might or might not be paranormal. I had the misfortune to be on the clock when such a case came up back in 2017. 999 was called for a young woman that had apparently had a seizure or something. We arrived alongside the ambulance, and I saw the girl as she was being carried out. Eyes wide open, mouth slack and drooling, and her skin all puffed and bloated. I was responsible for questioning the parents, who suspected she had been the victim of some sort of poisoning. The details they gave me and the products I found filling her room didn't give me too much to think about until later, when she reached the hospital and was found to be full of spider hatchlings.

Obviously, it was hell trying to keep things quiet, and the poor coroner performing the autopsy...but since I was one of the officers that took the call, I was the one sectioned. Since then, I've been doing my own research on what the hell causes women in their twenties to erupt into nightmares.

The family of the girl--who, mind you, were told that she had grown a cancerous mass and contracted a disease that resulted in hideous lesions--told me all about the products they thought might've caused it. According to them, she was a 'direct sales enthusiast'. Took me a long while to figure out what that meant, but in that instance, it meant she had a crapload of beauty products she'd bought for stupidly high prices and intended to sell. And the odd thing I noticed that night was--besides the sheer number of volume of products--was how the stash in her room, cluttering up her desk and a table, all looked like they hadn't been touched in ages. ...Not, in a derogatory sense, I mean they were literally covered in cobwebs. The products in her bathroom weren't quite as extreme, but there was still a bit of webbing even on the stuff she seemed to be using every day. Later on, I made sure to warn the parents, without telling them how their daughter had died of course, to get rid of everything her daughter had bought during her time in direct sales and to have the house fumigated as I suspected parasites had made their way into her things.

And then I started studying 'direct sales'. I'm pretty internet savvy, at least among my local force, so I did my digging. Ugly stuff, even before you get into anything involving spiders. Around the web, they call what that girl did 'multi-level marketng', or when they want to sugarcoat it further, 'network marketing'. It's basically a barely-legal version of a pyramid scheme. People--usually women--are roped in by promises of success with a company that allows them to work from home and control their schedule, by becoming 'independent marketers' and the like. The first person sells you product, you become part of the company, and then you get a bonus for every person you recruit in on top of what you sell. You can probably see where this is going.

I don't have the resources to investigate massive companies myself, though perhaps you might have more success there. What I did immediately find out, though, was that the company manufacturing at least a few of the beauty products she was selling had almost no documented history whatsoever. There were a few front websites, of course, but nothing truly verifiable. I found out in the same go that the person she'd bought these from was some kind of online influencer, very active on Instagram and to a lesser extent YouTube...until recently. One of a great many 'boss babes' that had risen through the ranks on the surface only to fall from grace later. Only this one hadn't just gone under, she'd disappeared. The product had been recalled and the user had apparently been 'harassed' offline and was no longer reachable by any means. Apparently, this lady had quite the huge audience and reach, so I immediately started looking into everyone that claimed to be her downline and who had brought product from her, all the while getting a better look at 'network marketing'.

It's nasty stuff. From the outside, it's obviously a bad idea--even when these companies aren't trying to sell you a blatantly unrealistic dream, it doesn't take much thought to make everything unravel and see that pretty much nobody comes out of those rich except the creators, they're basically debt machines. They've even become the subject of some online crusades to take them down, and words like 'addiction' and 'cult' have been applied. They can be pretty hard to argue with, too, when you see the insidious way these women are manipulated. It's ironic, isn't it? That they look for independence and somehow get more entrapped than ever before.

The first product I investigated was called _Silk and Velvet_ , which jumped out at me as a likely candidate for the contaminated product. I was on the money, too, as if you know anything about velvet spiders, you'll know they're the rare kind: social. After that, it was easy, I just posed as a desperate boss babe trying to get my hands on a dwindling supply of Silk and reached out to sellers. That's the good thing about 'direct sales' people--because they're so focused on drawing in downline or else they lose money, they're jumping at the bit to tell you all about their lovely new product. Many of them seemed desperate to get it off their hands. I also sought out families that had lost women, or men, to alleged seizures after using the product. I found out something interesting, which was that only about a twenty-fifth of all downline involved reported ill symptoms, and and an even smaller portion than that actually died. Nothing there for those poor families to sue, I expect. But it told me these people were smarter than I gave them credit for initially. With most of this stuff, the companies blatantly don't care what kind of harm their hackneyed beauty goo causes as they can usually counter-sue for defamation or just pay off angry huns, who usually can't fight their battles anyway because, you guessed it, they lost so much money in the course of their time under the pyramid scheme. Despite how big this one influencer had gotten, they made sure not to leave too much chaos in their wake since they didn't intend to stick around for the aftermath.

I've been keeping an eye on the network marketing scene ever since, and unfortunately, the tales of young people and older desperate mothers getting eaten alive from the inside by spiders didn't end there, and still hasn't really ended today. My research has turned up dozens of companies that are fronts for these things in multiple different ways. Quite often it's beauty products or dieting courses, but other times it even extends to clothing. And the places I've found them, the amount of reach they have, is...far bigger things than I can keep up with. I've known that for a while, but even after going vigilante--that's strictly confidential, of course--I just can't put a dent in these things. Do you know what the truth is about these...things posing as people and corrupting innocent victims over the web is? They're everywhere, and I do mean everywhere. Anywhere there's a good internet presence. It's not every influencer, of course, but it's far from a few. It's not even just the multi-level marketing idiots, either, there's hundreds of Instagram vloggers out there that rope their followers in and get them to put things in or on their bodies, or even just expose themselves in dangerous ways. I'm one person, I can't fight it all. I'm hanging up my badge, purely to get out from under a few prying eyes. I don't want to give up completely. Maybe there's some sort of...monster-hunting group I can join, and we can take these creeps down.

The audience is getting younger and younger, you know. It's bad enough when teen girls have to face their hair falling out because they blindly put their trust in something someone online sold to them. But when I think of everything I've seen, and I think of how powerless I am against it...

...I'm not stupid. I know you're more than just some building full of crackpots researching the supernatural. And I don't expect you to fight my battles because of that. But I've provided a list of the current marketers that I suspect are fronts for bizarre, alien, parasitic spider hatcheries, along with a document full of information on both those and previous such marketers, both those I've taken down and those that have crumbled and vanished once they achieved their goal. Use it however you will.

_Statement ends._


	5. Mama

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for physical abuse.
> 
> Statement of Karla Morgan, regarding something in her basement. Original statement given May 17th, 2014. Audio recording by the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
> 
> Statement begins.

Our mother was abusive.

It would be nice to be able to tell you that she just screamed at us or never paid attention to us, or the like. But Mum had some seriously volatile mental issues. Or at least, that's the word from after the court case. In truth, I just think she's evil. A monster.

There's no real starting place for it. We grew up from birth being treated like garbage. Mum would explode at us over the slightest things, and beat us until we bruised if we ever acted out. Tommy and I were crying more often than not while under her care, though eventually we learned to do it quietly. ...I remember my first nightmares about the closet better than I remember my first actual time in it. It was a consistent part of our hellish lives. See, when Mum couldn't get us to stop bawling, or when one of us had an accident, or when one of us broke something, she would drag us down to the closet at the end of the hall and stuff us inside, and lock the door.

The closet was a terrifying place. Once the door was closed on you, it was pitch black. The walls were so thick, and the space so small, and when you're a child, that's the worst thing you can be put through. The already scant room to move around in would seem to steadily contract until the walls had closed in on you and were threatening to crush you. They would indent, cave in, and form sharp edges, and then the sharp edges would deform into jagged, splintered boards, and things like teeth would protrude from the spaces where the breaks happened. And I remember screaming, and screaming, and banging on the door and twisting the knob, and that only seemed to make the walls close in faster. The only thing that never shrank was the door--if anything, it always got taller, so that the knob would get further and further away.

And just like I would scream my head off, and cry to be let out, I could hear pounding from the other side of the door--Thomas, my little brother. He would hear me and come running, trying desperately to get me out, just like I would do for him whenever it was him locked in the closet. And from the other sides, his pleading and frantic pounding would always get quieter, and quieter, until they faded away completely, and I was alone. That was always the scariest part, whether you were on the inside or the outside. When I was inside, I'd wonder if Mum had come and gotten him and dragged him off, or if he was never there to begin with. When I was on the outside, I'd wonder if the closet had finally just swallowed him and taken away my little brother forever. And only after the voice of my brother faded would the closet finish contracting, squeezing and tightening until I couldn't breathe and started to choke, the walls and their teeth denting inward right around my neck...and then I would fall unconcious, and wake up on the floor in front of the opened closet that had popped me out, with Tommy trying to drag my limp form back down the hall to our bedroom. We'd hold each other tightly in the bed, guarding each other from monsters and pretending to be asleep when Mum walked by.

Like I said, this was normal for us. The only reason we knew that life wasn't like this for everyone was because Mum also had a rotating cast of boyfriends she paid much more affection to than us. Even the ones that weren't all that enthused about kids and obviously only put up with them to get in good with the mom were, if nothing else, decent to us. Occasionally there would be one who was actually very friendly and nice, and liked kids, and would dote on us. They never lasted, because Mum could never conceal the signs from them for long...except in one case.

There was one man she dated who was sharper than the others, and kinder, too. He was never allowed to stay the night, of course, but he could occasionally get her to stay at his place, and we were left in peace. We still had a house phone, so late at night, after she had gone to sleep, he'd call to check on us, and advise us on the best ways to watch television and eat snacks without getting caught. If I had homework, he would talk me through it over the phone. He was so cool...and I remember him asking if we wanted a dad. Of course we said yes. And after that, it wasn't long before they were getting married.

I still don't know how he convinced her to do it, and I'm tempted to say mind control. Mum knew full well she would never be able to keep custody of us or keep a man if they ever found out how she treated us, so she never intended any single man to stay long. But she was head over heels, and she said yes. They had a quick hitch just out of the city while we were home alone, and she came home wearing a glittering asteroid on her finger. Of course, Mum didn't change her behavior. She just worked harder to conceal it. There was a manic sort of gleam in her eye whenever she had reason to be angry with us, but couldn't take it out on us because Dad was in the house. I think that scared me more than her typical fury did. Now that I'm older, and have been told the truth, I know that Dad was working this whole time to try and undermine her, waiting for her to slip up. And eventually, she did--three weeks after the marriage, he took a 'night shift' and Mum took that as free reign to start stuffing us in the closet after 6 if we misbehaved. The very first time it happened, he was back home in under an hour, slinging the front door open claiming to have forgotten something, and he heard me and Tommy screaming. I remember light flooding the crack under the door and breaching the closet, and parts of the teeth retracting as if they'd gotten burned. And he flung the door open, standing there looking horrified...

I never actually found out what Mum did when one of us was locked in the closet until that night. Turns out she just napped on the sofa downstairs. He tried to get us down the hall, downstairs, and out of the house, but she was there at the end of the hall, with this big knife, and I knew she wasn't going to let any of us get away. He shoved us in our room and told us to lock the door, and we sat there on the bed, shaking and terrified, while sounds of fighting and bodies hitting surfaces shook the walls. It seemed like it took forever for him to open the door, holding a frying pan and bidding us to come out. He led us out past the unconscious figure of our mother and outside, where police were waiting, along with an ambulance to treat his wounds. We got taken too, and checked over and then sent to the police station to wait. Dad later explained to me that if he'd just called the police the minute he knew what was happening to us, he'd never get to keep us, and we'd be sent to a foster home. He was allowed to take us in, after lying through his teeth about exactly how long he and Mum had been dating before tying the not. And early that morning, we were laid down on the couch in an entirely new home, and we woke up the next day to the rest of our lives.

...Mum is supposed to be in a mental ward...

Well, anyway. Our life did a one-eighty after that. It was like waking up from a nightmare, even though I actually did still have nightmares. Tommy and I, who'd been deemed extremely malnourished and abused on top of traumatized, were assigned a counselor we saw once a week. Dad had a nice place, and he was always on his feet to help us get adjusted and show us the love we'd been denied growing up. I was fourteen at this point, and Tommy was ten. And we loved it there, we really did.

But there were...how do I put this? There were dark spots. Obviously, Tommy and I had claustrophobia by now, so we avoided the closets. But there was also the basement. We were terrified of it, even though we'd never lived in a house with a basement before, and it was kept locked at all times. I couldn't actually explain the fear of it we had at the time, if you were to ask. All I knew was that it was 'scary'. But within the first year, we had a reason, and that was the sounds that were coming from down there. We would tell Dad, about the quiet taps or creaks we would hear from near the door, and whimper to him that there was something _down there_ , something hiding and waiting to _get us_ , and he would tell us it was just the house settling. He even went down there with us one time, with a flashlight in hand, to show us there was nothing down there. That didn't really help, because now we knew what it looked like: dark, dank, cramped, and filthy. But at least there was nothing down there, right?

Well, another year went by, and there were more sounds, scratchings at the door, and the sounds of something hitting some hard surface down there. Dad kept telling us it was nothing, and that there was nothing down there. But by then, we were old enough to be at the house alone while he went off to work, and that was when things got worse. The sounds from the basement got louder, and happened more often, whenever Dad wasn't home and we were. The door down there was kept locked at all times, but we still worried. The scratchings at the door got worse and worse. I remember telling Tommy to watch TV for a bit while I went to get something. I stood at the top of the steps leading down to the basement door and waited, and the scratchings kept up for ten minutes until finally going quiet.

The years went by, and try as we might to get used to the basement and its 'house settling' noises, it would advance whenever we were getting too comfortable. There were thuds and bangs, and eventually we heard the sound of whispering carrying up the stairs. Always when it was just us in the house. The nightmares kept up, and every once in a while I would see the door to the basement in them...but not always from the outside. The sounds of crying and moaning joined the rest, and by the time I was eighteen, I dreaded seeing Dad leave out the front door. He's still very wonderful to us, you know, we couldn't ask for a better father. But somehow, I know better than to approach him about what's in the basement again. At first, I thought he wouldn't believe us. But now I know he would believe us, and would pretend not to.

I'm nineteen now, and the sounds from the basement are more persistent than ever. There's wails, and the occasional shriek, and loud bangs are routine. Something is definitely on the other side of that door, determined to get out. And see, I know better now. I could ignore it before, but...I know the voice screaming and crying inside the basement. I know who's trying to claw her way out. It's Mum.

I don't think she's in the mental ward. I don't think she ever was. Somehow, I think Dad sealed her underneath the house. I wonder if he has a plan for when she's going to break out. Because she's going to, I'm sure of it. She's getting more aggressive by the day. It's not just when we pass the basement door, anymore. Tommy and I, we can feel her underneath us, under out feet, pushing up against the floorboards, as if she's going to burst through the cement and wood flooring and grab us. The nightmares happen nightly, now. Some day soon, the creak we hear isn't going to be wood flooring, it will be the door opening.

The next time Dad leaves the house, I'm leaving, too. I'm taking Tommy and leaving, and I don't know where I'll be going. But we can't stay in that house. We both know it's us she wants, and she won't wait much longer.

_Statement ends._


	6. Hermit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Madison Reynolds, regarding her son's behavioral disorders. Original statement given September 22nd, 2017. Audio recording by the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

I know, you're probably not going to believe this, or look into it, but...I still have to try. It's about my son. He's gotten very weird lately, and some unsettling stuff's been happening around the house.

He was nineteen when all of this started, and he's twenty now. He's always been an avid gamer, and his father and I don't pretend to know all that much about why it's good or what separates him from any other gamers, but we indulged him as a child and a teen, and when the games became too expensive for us to keep up with, he took up a job to pay for his hobby, so it was never that big a deal. And I've never paid any stock to nonsense about video games rotting your mind, and whatnot. If anything, he's an extremely intelligent boy. I mean, yes, we'd express occasional concern when he spent most of the day playing one game he was stuck on, but as long as he kept his grades up and got enough food and sleep, we didn't see any reason to interfere.

The first sign that something was wrong was when he started sleepwalking. That, I mean, was bizarre, and I'll admit it worried us a bit. Most sleepwalkers are children, and a few are teenagers, but Robbie was an adult by now. He didn't do anything particularly upsetting, but you never know what can happen, and there's all sorts of stories about people getting hurt because they were sleepwalking. We learned to stay up a bit later than usual, so we could lead him back to bed and he could get his rest, although it wasn't an easy adjustment. Even then, though we didn't think there was necessarily anything wrong. We'd noticed he was playing video games for longer periods than usual, and telling us to leave his dinner in the microwave on occasion.

And then his sleeping patterns changed. He started sleeping later into the morning, and staying up later into the night. This was where we started to put our foot down--after all, if he didn't get up in the mornings, he couldn't go to work, and he'd lose his job. We started to have fights with him over this. He's like anyone else, if you draw the curtains back while he's sleeping, he gets very cranky, et cetera. But I remember wondering when he'd started closing his curtains to begin with. And, of course, no matter how much we fought about it, he wouldn't change. He kept sleeping later, and later, and later, until he was up all hours of the night and slept all hours of the day. We tried to get him to see a doctor, but he just wouldn't, and we learned to wake him up just as we were going to bed. The sleepwalking had stopped.

We learned to stop asking about his job, and his bosses never called us. We would text him application links, but they were never answered, and he was almost never leaving the house. I noticed he was keeping his room darker, and darker, and darker, and was starting to act like he had bad eyes, avoiding any bright lights and cursing if anyone had something up too bright. Our next big fight came when we noticed he was playing video games in complete darkness in his room. It's not even remotely healthy, that, it kills your eyes. The funny thing was that he'd never had a problem with that before--in fact, he had agreed with us on that point and so, at least growing up, he'd kept his room's lamps on when playing in the evenings. It was weird to see him go back on that now, and I just didn't understand his adamant insistence that he just _liked it better_ that way. By now I was really, really worried, and I had started to think my husband was onto something with his mutterings about committing Robbie to a mental ward, if only so that he could be seen and maybe treated for whatever was wrong with him now.

We've stopped waking him up, and stopped even knocking on his door to let him know lunch or dinner are ready. We just leave his meals in the microwave or fridge, and they've vanished by morning, even though we never hear the microwave running or see any lights turning on behind the crack under the door. He barely comes out of his room anymore, and keeps it locked at all times. He hardly speaks to us.

Recently, he had a fight with his father that got physical. Bill had tried to drag him out of his room and make him eat, convinced he couldn't possibly be healthy, and I think he was right. His skin was so pale, and I caught a glimpse of his eyes--they looked like they had cataracts in them. He was yelling like he was in pain--and if he had been, it would've made sense, except I don't think William was the one hurting him. He was thrashing around like his whole body was on fire, or like he was drowning, trying to get away from the light. And he was so strong. Bill had asked me for my help in pulling him out of his room. Bill's a big man, mind you, used to work in construction, and much bigger and stronger than Robbie, and I'm...well, as you can see, I'm no picture of muscle. But I tried, and the two of us together couldn't do it. He threw us off, and ran back to his room, slamming the door shut and locking it, and neither one of us could get it open after that. Eventually we stopped trying.

I know it would be easy to blame me for this. I did, at first. Kicked myself for not being hard enough on him, wondering if I was going to have to throw him out of the house. This is what a video game addiction can do to a family unchecked, I told myself. And that all made sense enough, except that he's stopped playing the video games. Doesn't even have them anymore.

See, just a few days ago... Bill and I had taken a week off from work each, to try and find out what was going on with Robbie, so we were going to stay up and see just how different he was at night. After the sun had gone down, and we had turned off all the lights and gone back to our bedroom, we stayed awake and waited. We heard the carpet shifting and the floorboards creaking, so we knew when he was going to get food, and we heard his door closing once he'd gotten it. It was my idea to use a candle, figuring that he'd react worse to artificial light. We went out into the hall, and it was dark, even though it was barely eleven. The street lights should've been visible through the window in the living room, but they weren't. I knocked on his door, and I could hear silence from inside, different from before, even though I wasn't hearing anything from the room to begin with. I called out, as quietly as I could, "Robbie? Can I come in?"

I don't know what I expected, but I heard his voice, pleasantly enough, saying "Come on in, Mum". So I carefully opened the door, and I knew immediately something was wrong. Of course, when I brought the candle in, he hissed and told me to put it out, and I weakly protested that I needed to see, but I covered the flame with one hand, and that seemed to placate him. I could feel Bill standing behind me, like he was afraid I'd get hurt. Robbie was just sitting on his bed, looking at me. And I looked around his room, with the candlelight casting shadows, and I asked him what he'd done with all of his video games. None of the consoles or cases that I remembered so clearly were here anymore. No laptop, no headset, no equipment... I could see cords behind the TV where it had been unplugged. I felt...I felt a realization, felt it sinking down my throat, before he answered. He told me he'd gotten rid of them. Didn't want them anymore. That they were boring.

And you have to understand...that is _not_ like him. Not at all. The entire time he's grown up in my house, video games have been Robbie's whole world. He loves them more than anything, he always talked about wanting to make video games for a living. With all the money I've spent for him on these things, and how many hours he's whiled away absorbed in his favorite games month after month, year after year...something's seriously wrong with him. Or maybe it isn't even him anymore. My Robbie would never do that.

I told him I just wanted to check up on him, make sure he was okay. "I'm fine, Mum." he'd said, and I told him goodnight, and he said "Goodnight, Mum, I love you."

Even though we're back at work now, Bill and I have continued to stay up late into the night. We haven't actually _seen_ our son since then. We know he's still here, but there's barely any sign of his presence. Bill will listen at his door at night, and he tells me he hears scratching, like the sounds of pencils on paper, like he's writing something, but without any light, he shouldn't be able to do that. I don't know what to do. Something's taken away our son, and I'm growing scared of what will happen next. What does he _do_ in there? The other day, Bill tried to turn the knob on his door and found it unlocked. He got it open only a crack before the sound of something spitting and hissing made him shut it again.

We've had to start replacing our lights more often than normal. Bill's started talking about switching entirely to candles, but even the flames on the wicks burn down low almost too quickly. I don't know what to do...I don't know what to do...

_Statement ends._


	7. Dear Dad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of an anonymous narrator, concerning her father. Original statement given September 8th, 2015. Audio recording by the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
> 
> Statement begins.

I'm not giving you my name, because I'm being followed and I don't want to get caught, and I don't want you to get hurt.

I was grew up in the country, surrounded by forest. My dad raised me, since my mum had died when I was young. I don't have any siblings or living grandparents, aunts, or uncles, so it's just been my dad and me all my life, and up until recently, that's been just fine by me. We weren't necessarily the most country people to ever country, but we were definitely out there, and a lot of the food we ate was stuff dad had bagged, skinned, cleaned, and cooked. He was real big on hunting, had been doing it ever since he was a young man, and he was fully capable of sustaining the both of us on just his skill with a rifle and a knife. And there was nothing wrong with that. I grew up pretty desensitized to dead animals, is all. Not to say Dad wanted me to kill animals, no--I was never allowed to join him, even though he was teaching me how to shoot bows and guns and skin things. The only thing I was supposed to be doing to an animal was petting our dog, this big Harrier that I loved to death named Houdini--I got to name him.

Dad had a back room that he did all his prep with carcasses in, that I was explicitly never allowed to go into. I'd tried to sneak some peeks inside when I was younger, and Dad had been livid enough that I hadn't tried it again. By the time he'd decided I was old enough to learn how to skin animals like him, I knew enough to lose interest in what was in the back room now that I knew, or thought I knew, most of what happened in it. It wasn't until earlier this year that I started to wonder again.

The first sign was the papers, and the posters. We lived far enough out that whenever I had to get to school, or we needed to go grocery shopping, or whatever nonsense, we had to drive a fair bit of distance. So, I always had time to see the posters up on telephone poles and the sides of buildings. Dad would usually ask me to get the paper while he filled up on gas, so I was able to catch headlines about animal attacks in the woods, with venturers getting horribly injured by some sort of wild animal. This had me puzzled. I've seen my share of American movies, so I know that 'wolf attack' and 'bear attack' pop up in the slasher genre a lot, but neither of those animals has existed in England for hundreds of years, and neither have wolverines. They've been trying to reintroduce wild boars, so maybe that was it? I brought it up to my dad, and he just said the woods were a dangerous place and that unprepared people shouldn't be there.

A while later, the missing persons posters popped up. Wasn't much to bother me, but they never really went away. Poster after poster about missing people, with rewards for their safe return. I started keeping track of the faces, and I remember asking Dad, while he read the news, whether he thought it was the animal in the woods, or...something else, and if we should be worried. He laughed it off easily and said he wasn't too concerned about it.

The first sign that something was wrong in my home was the blood on his clothes. Now, I was no stranger to blood, and I'd seen Dad strolling out of his back room in bloodied shirts and pants plenty of times. It's the sort of thing you get used to, growing up the way I did. But the thing is, he had never gone _in_ looking like that, or smelling like that. Dad was a good enough hunter and bagger that he almost never got any blood on him before getting home. That worried me, a lot, but I rationalized it. Told myself he was just doing some of the skinning before driving home, for some reason. And indeed, most of what he was bringing back home didn't take as long as it usually did in the back room to prep. It made perfect sense.

And then Houdini started to get agitated. He was always on edge, especially after he'd come back from a trip with Dad. I remember having to hold him a lot to calm him down, and I'd keep him close at night so he'd stay calm, otherwise he'd start to bark and wake up Dad, who'd get real mad with him. I wondered if he was reacting to whatever was out there in the woods that was dangerous.

I finished school recently, and thus I started spending a lot more time inside the house, so I guess that's what led me to notice it more. The changes, the details. It felt like Dad was... _looking_ at me more often. I'd turn around to speak to him and he'd avert his eyes, and I'd wonder if I'd missed something funny, or if there was something on my back. Our diet started to include more meat than ever, which was starting to look a tad rarer than I'd like. Got sick the one time, and stayed in, and Dad doted on me and apologized over and over for under-cooking. He seemed antsy, never quite able to totally relax, even when reading the newspaper and smoking, and I remember asking him why he was standing so close a couple times. And of course, Houdini was getting more and more scared, and Dad was getting more sour in response. I kind of understood why he was so pissed off with being woken up all the time by the loud barking, but I pleaded with him not to send our beloved dog to a shelter. And then one day, Houdini barked, and dad got up to go...I don't know. He was already inside, and I was out there in the living room holding him, and in hindsight I realize that Dad had arrived in the living room too quickly to reprimand the dog, like he hadn't been in bed where he was supposed to be.

I'd never had any reason to doubt that my father loved me. He's always been kind to me, always fed me and clothed me, and the thought of his booming laugh echoing throughout the cabin we lived in still brings back fond memories. But I started to wonder, as the weeks turned into months with so many little behaviors and odd changes here and there. And there were other details that I didn't notice until it all came together. On one of the last days I stayed in our cabin, I remembered looking at the missing person posters as I drove away from home, and I realized that if I were to ever go missing, there would be no poster for me. No one would realize I was gone, and no one was close enough to me and my dad to notice our... _my_ disappearance.

The next day, Houdini went missing. Hadn't come back from a hunting trip with Dad, who had stayed out very late trying to find him, or so he told me. He reassured me that the dog had probably holed up somewhere digging for voles, and would find his way back home on his own soon enough. It didn't help. I could feel myself trying to believe it. And I wasn't succeeding.

One day, after seeing my dad lick his lips, lick his too-sharp teeth before going off one one of his latest hunting trips, I decided to go to the back room. I'd never actually been in there before, never seen the inside beyond what I could see around Dad's legs that one time when I was little. And I'm not going to tell you what was in there, because I'm sure you've already guessed. Once I walked up to the table, and saw my dog...

I left. Barely an hour later, I left. I packed up my things, took my cell phone and my keys and hopped in my car and left. I've been on the run ever since.

He's called me plenty of times, of course, wondering where his precious little girl is and asking if she won't come home. I remember the first time he called, I didn't expect him to keep his temper in check, but I wish he had yelled. He was totally normal and sounded so concerned when asking his baby girl to come home, because after all, there's nothing scary in the woods, and if there were, he'd protect me from it. But I heard it. The faint little pauses, the tiny, barely-present noises reaching the receiver from his mouth. Like he had to speak around a mouthful of saliva. That slight sniff wasn't because he was crying, either.

I've since ditched the phone and bought a new one and a new number. I live in my car, never stopping too long in any one place, and certainly not staying in any flat or even squatting in houses. At first I thought I was imagining the signs, but no, he's definitely following me. I can sense it. He's like a bloodhound, and if I don't keep moving, I know he's going to catch up to me. I haven't kept in contact with any friends, and I've been moving up and down the country. The occasional glances I've seen of his car have been terrifying, though he hasn't been close enough to his jeep to get in and chase me when it's happened. I stay away from the airports. I know I need to leave the country, but I can see his prints and tracks all over the streets surrounding them. I know he's hoping to ambush me at one of them. I've been trying to get in contact with someone who can get me onto a boat--because that's his weakness. Dad doesn't fish, you see. Can't even swim, even though we lived near a lake. I can. And I feel like if I can get out on the water, he won't follow me. Or at least it will buy me enough time to hide from him for a while and maybe prepare myself for the moment of truth, when he _does_ find me.

If someone comes in here looking for me, you'll know it's him, and if by some chance you've done some sort of research and found out who I am, don't tell him. I'm not above coming back here to tie up loose ends. I have to be efficient. I'm terrified, but I have to survive. So you do what you need to do, too, got it?

I hope this statement helps you with...whatever it is you do here. But I've already spent too long here, so I'm out. Goodbye.

_Statement ends._


	8. Ink Blots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for mentions of excessive violence, rape, and arson.
> 
> Confession of Dominic Jennings, a death row inmate. Confession, originally dated June 5th, 2013, submitted to the Magnus Institute as a statement at Jennings' request.
> 
> Statement begins.

This statement isn't here to make my excuses, or make people sorry for me. I know what I did, and the justice system needs to ice me for it. But I need someone to know how it started...what I think happened.

Joining a gang isn't really that different than joining a cult, it's just a little less organized. You're down on your luck, you're frustrated with the world, and some people come along and tell you it's alright. That your anger makes sense. That you have people you can trust and rely on. And even if it's true, even if the capacity for good is there, it can all go downhill and spiral.

When I first found my 'brothers', my own little 'family', we weren't much. Just a few guys willing to steal to survive, who'd been getting rough with some other thugs here and there. We liked to get drunk and go on trips, and we helped each other, got each other food, spotted each other cash, beat down people who fucked over our boys. Somewhere along the way, it became this formal thing, and we were looking for leadership. That role came naturally to Ross. You know him as the ringleader and the most depraved, but back then, when I was just some runt looking for food and companionship, it was easy to see him as a big brother. We all did. By far the nastiest when pissed off, enough to keep the others in line, but also warm to us. And eventually he said to me, trying to cheer me up on a day when I was down, 'Nic, you ever thought about getting a tattoo? You'd look good with one.' The most I'd ever gotten was a tiny little piercing in my ear, and I'd hated that, 'cause I hated pain. But I wanted Ross to think I was cool, so I agreed to get one, and he took me to this shady, out of the way parlor, where he introduced me to Leon Lennox.

Now, I don't usually judge books by their covers, but Leon Lennox was a _creep_. The minute you looked at him, saw his get-up, the way he walked, the expression on his face while he huffed that cigarette that was always in his mouth...the look in his eyes especially is what gave it away. One look, and you knew this dude had bodies in his back room. It almost hurt to see him looking at you, 'cause he stared. He stared at everything and anyone, always like he was hoping to hurt whatever came under his gaze. Ross told me, both the times I gave him worried looks and whispered to him, that the guy was definitely alright, and the best tattoo artist in town.

I was not happy when he bent over me to give me the tattoo I'd chosen--some generic, gangster-looking print of a skull wrapped in flames. He seemed to be too close even when he wasn't, and the inking was painful as hell. I remember thinking I'd rather he took the cigarette to my arm than keep dragging that needle so slowly across my skin. And I don't doubt he would've done both. He was enjoying it. I realize that now. Pain under his fingers fed him, gave him pleasure, and it wasn't normal ink he was tattooing me with. And when he gave me my instructions for aftercare and sent me and Ross away, he had the most self-satisfied expression from him. He called out to me 'do great things, Nic!' And Ross called over his shoulder that I would.

It sounds stupid, thinking a tattoo could make you a different person. But I guess it didn't. It just...amplified me. My anger turned to spite, my spite turned to sadism. That tattoo was more of a brand, and looking back, I can trace the steady slope I slipped off of to the ink I got, and the same with my friends. At some point, everyone in our little gang had ink from Lennox, and their slopes always started there. We justified our actions more and more the further along we got, until we couldn't enjoy anything we did unless it was brutal and painful. In our quests for money, and drugs, and food, and revenge, we always started with normal stuff. Reasonable stuff. Stealing from assholes, or beating up people who'd gotten in our faces and threatened us or a friend. As time wore on, we stole for less and less, and did greater harm to anyone in our path. We steadily lost the ability to distinguish between who had to suffer and who had to die, and then between who had to die and who was collateral. And then we stopped trying to justify it altogether.

Even with what I've said here, even if some nutjob was willing to consider 'cursed tattoos' as some kind of explanation for what we did, I doubt they'd see the patterns I do now. They'd just see it as the normal progression of gang violence. But was it really a coincidence that the people who got ink eventually started smoking even when they'd never touched a cigarette before? Was it really a coincidence that we started burning down buildings, and took so quickly to it? Was it normal for the tattoo to itch like it wasn't healed, even months after it had, until we'd satisfied the violent tempers we'd suddenly find ourselves in?

I didn't exactly like myself, mind you, while I was descending further and further into an addiction to blood and hatred. It's just that, with the sway I was under, I took a lot of lives and hurt a lot of people before I realized how far I'd gone. And if you think I'm bad--you haven't caught most of the truly bad ones yet. The ones to whom torturing men, raping women, and killing both and burning down their houses was like air to breathe. That includes Ross. If you want a hint as to what our big bad 'ringleader' looks like, here's one--he's covered head to toe in dark ink, all of it gotten from the same shop, and he sucks on cigarettes like pacifiers. As for me, I only ever got the one, and I was only able to wake up when I realized that I was starting to crave another tattoo. That's a weird thing to say, and I can't exactly describe it. It wasn't like needing food, or drugs. The ink on my shoulder was dissatisfied. It was getting hungrier and the arsons we were committing were giving it diminishing returns. I somehow knew, that if I wanted this flow of energy, of relief, to keep up, I needed to get more ink. That's what snapped me out of it, and made me turn myself in.

Call me sick all you like. I _am_ sick. But I have proof, now. My sentence is coming down on me, soon. I think that's why Leon Lennox came to visit me in prison. He stared at my with those hungry eyes, and with this affected tone, faker than if he'd had a script in front of him. And he told me all about how sorry all this was, how bad I'd messed up, and how awful it was to see me go down this path. I'd had so much to do, so much to live for, he'd said. I knew what he really meant. He's not sorry I did all of that. He's sorry I stopped, sorry I'm about to die instead of breaking out and jacking off over a burnt corpse or something. He only hoped I wasn't really going to die a quiet little snuffed-out candle.

And after that, well...look at my shoulder. I tried to cut it off. I'm not telling you how I got hold of something sharp enough to do it with, so fuck off. But I did, and I tried to cut this stupid ink right off of my body. And as you can see, it didn't work. My arm's damn near useless now, I cut away so much skin and flesh, but it's still there, staining me right down to my bones. It bled ink and smoldered while I cut at it. I think it was angry, and when I inhaled the smoke, it turned me on, flashing me back to the ashes of a drug dealer's house I'd burnt down, with all his whores inside, and reminding me of how good it had felt. It told me that if I stabbed my cellmate when he got back from his medical exam, it would feel good, and that if I watched him suffer and plead not to die, it'd feel even better. I didn't listen, but I'm glad that my execution is coming soon. I can't be free of this, but I can die full of spite.

When they're cleaning out my cell, they'll find newspaper clippings. I've torn out story after story of criminals who've been arrested in a specific area downtown, for things like killing their wives and kids, or raping some coworker, and whatnot. I marked the ones whose mugshots showed some hint of a tattoo. It wouldn't surprise me if they're all connected.

If you see Ross, tell him I'm sorry. If you see Leon Lennox, arrest him. Make up some crime if you have to. He's dangerous, and he'll keep doing this, and keep feeding off of his little 'disciples' he creates.

And do me a favor--cremate my corpse. Save my family some money.

_Statement ends._


	9. Eye of the Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of ARWO Immanuel Hawkins, regarding an unusual experience inside of a hurricane. Statement taken direct from subject and recorded October 13th, 2017.
> 
> Statement begins.

This is my first time ever coming to England. I've been trying to find a place suitable to tell this story, but D.C. really doesn't suit me recently, so I flew out here. It's quite odd to find myself here. I understand Europe isn't as familiar with hurricanes or hurricane seasons as the Americas, so I don't know how well I can communicate just how much God seems to hate the Atlantic coastline in particular, but I'll try.

Hurricanes are a force of nature. They're not just storms--they're organized collections of superstorms that rise from the ocean like C'thulhu and head for the mainland with a fury. There's a reason we give them names, because power like that earns awe and respect. It's like the world itself is coming to life. Nature's wrath, and all that. Billions upon billions in property damage each year, and dozens to hundreds of deaths. But that's just the thing: even if they terrify you, they also inspire amazement. Wrapping your head around the very concept of a hurricane can be a bit much.

I'm an aerial reconnaissance weather officer for the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, or one half of America's own hurricane hunters. Me and four other men fly out in planes--not specially-built or armored ones, just normal ones--and head directly into burgeoning tropical cyclones, and send the data back. It can get pretty scary out there, but I've always had strong nerves, and I sort of consider this my calling. This experience happened just recently while we were dealing with Maria, which was especially important as Harvey and Irma had just made everyone pay special attention to the season.

'The eye of the storm' sounds like a pretty scary thing, doesn't it? Kind of like 'the belly of the beast'. And that's not entirely inaccurate, given that you're surrounded by the worst parts of the storm on all sides. But as anyone versed in meteorology will tell you, the eye is actually by far the calmest part of a hurricane. Flying out there, the biggest threat to any fliers is the eyewall. That's where the storms are the most violent and the winds actually present a threat to aircraft. As it happens, that's also my favorite, and least favorite, part of flying out and collecting data. You can really feel it when you're battling your way through the eyewall, and it can feel like the ratty little plane you're in is about to come apart and send you hurtling to your death. Looking out the window, you can barely see for rain, but there's not much to see because everything is black. It's nothing short of terrifying, nerves of steel or otherwise. And then you break through, and you're free. You can look out the window, where before you were seeing darkness, and suddenly you're looking at the entire storm from the inside. It's beautiful. It's like being on the edge of a mountain peak, and seeing a mountain range and a whole huge valley stretching out beneath you, except you're in the sky. And the winds are so relaxed as to barely be present. It's something close to spiritual, honestly. I could do it a thousand times.

But, this isn't how it went with Maria.

The first sign that something was wrong were the readings we were getting. Not necessarily about the violence of the storm, though make no mistake, Maria was kicking it into high gear and her winds were pretty strong. What I'm talking about are these things called 'dropsondes'. Little water-bottle sized electronic devices that we wrap in cardboard tubes and drop from the plane to collect the data we need. It's my responsibility to record, check, and re-check the data coming back from the dropsondes. FYI, we drop dozens of these things during a typical examination of a cyclone, as we need data from as many parts of the storm over the entire trip, and hence they're designed to be fairly disposable, if you call $750 disposable in any form. They're made of metals and other materials that corrode extremely quickly in salt water while still being able to get us the information we need, so they don't pose a threat to sea life. Once they hit the water and sink, the electronics short out very quickly. My sonde operator was dropping these things, but it was hell trying to organize the readings coming in, because it was all getting very clogged. I was getting readings from more of the materials than I should have been. It only takes about ten to twenty minutes for a sonde to hit the water based on how high you're flying, and we weren't flying that high. But these things were still sending updates half an hour later. It was like they were just...I don't know, falling forever. I suppose there could have been something wrong with the tubing we stuffed them into stopping them from shorting out, but the readings weren't the typical measures for the 'wind pressure' you find underwater.

I wasn't able to devote as much thought to this as I should have, because Maria herself was giving us trouble. The winds were starting to get very fierce as we got closer to the center, and you could hear it inside the craft--which, with state-of-the-art headphones in, was quite a feat. Then, our plane started to creak and shudder, which is _never_ a good sign. Not to oversell how dangerous this job is, but hurricane hunters _do_ die on occasion, and I was getting a tad nervous that I'd soon be among that number, along with my crew. We were only about halfway into the storm bands when this was happening.

Readings continued to clog up my computer, of course, only sometimes when I looked at them, they weren't quite right. I'd see a number followed by way too many zeroes, and I thought the screen was glitching out and forgetting to add a decimal. At one point, I got an error message. There was another message soon after that was letters rather than numbers, but it disappeared before I could see what it said. This whole time, I was hearing the wind even past my headphones, until I took them off for just a moment to speak to a pilot. Then I realized that the sound wasn't just penetrating my headphones, it was coming from inside them. I messed around with it a little, trying to see what I was getting interference from, only for the sound coming from them to be matched by an _incredibly_ loud howling from all around us. It was everywhere, and I wouldn't be exaggerating to say I felt like the storm was trying very hard to kill us. Everyone on board was very nervous, especially our co-pilot, who seemed especially anxious. He would ask me or another officer to clarify what we had said to him, only for us to respond that we hadn't said anything, and he was getting jumpy and slipping up. The pilot had to correct him several times before he pressed the wrong lever.

It didn't take me long to understand what he was going through. It got to me, too. I pretended not to hear it...and even now I'm not sure I really did, though I think that's because I'm away from the storms now. But we started going further in, all of us on edge and feeling very much like our plane was going to implode sooner or later. I was looking out the window more often than I should have, only to see that pitch blackness and wish I hadn't. We started heading for the eyewall, and it got worse than ever as we passed through. The roaring was constant now, inescapable, and I was praying the pilot would take us through quickly as my fear turned to dread. I couldn't help but feel that this thing was going to eat us if we tempted it for too long. I wanted to penetrate the wall and see that stunning sight, feel that beautiful calm, that makes it all worth it in the end.

Well, eventually, we did. We found the eye, but it wasn't anything like I had hoped or learned to expect. The shuddering, the roaring, the messages on the screen, the roaring in my head, they all mounted. I saw the wall of the storms and the valley stretching out before me, not white, but black. The sky was barely any different, inky and starless, and the window cracked while I watched. Everything was coming apart, and I felt so small and helpless. A drop of cold sweat, or maybe rain, hit me just above my eye, and my dread turned to terror as I heard metal screech. This was all wrong, but it was happening, and I was about to die.

And then I heard something over my headset. Past all of the howling and roaring, I heard a voice not inside my head, but in my ear like it should have. Only this wasn't the indistinct, C'thulhu-esque voice of a massive, powerful, interminable being angry at my intrusion. It was the voice of our pilot. It was so faint, but I'm sure I heard it. If I made out the words right, his voice was saying something like 'It's alright, baby'.

And then it all stopped. Everything went back to normal. I was suddenly coping with a massive loss of data as everything that had been piling up from the dropsondes disappeared and left the accurate readings in their wake, but it took me a while to get to them. The eye was back to normal, and the howling was gone. The crack in the window was definitely there, but the sky was clear and blue. Our plane didn't feel like it was about to shatter underneath us anymore. I couldn't take comfort in it. I was shaking all the way around the eye and especially on the trip back, where I kept my eyes away from the window the entire time.

After the flight was over, I asked our pilot what it was he had said as we broke through Maria's eye. He didn't seem to remember, or he was pretending not to. I didn't press the issue. I've since quit my service as an ARWO and don't intend to go near any more hurricanes ever again. Something about that whole flight went wrong. I've tried a dozen ways to rationalize it, everything from nerves, to a hangover I didn't have, to a gas leak on the plane making us see and hear things. It doesn't work, though. And since, I haven't been able to stop thinking about what exactly a hurricane _is_. If I had some once-in-a-lifetime experience, or...or if they're all like that. Or if they are _all_ actually god-like beasts bringing down their wrath on tiny, fragile little lives like us, and wondering if so why it was exactly we had earned the notice of storms. Maybe we, as a species, have gone too far. Maybe these things are telling us to retreat and go back to being in the dark.

Yes, I know all of that sounds a bit too existential. I've kept in touch with my other hurricane hunter officers, but never been able to contact the pilot of that flight. Not sure I want to. Maybe I'll just stay here in England. Planes have been making me more than a little nervous lately, as you'll understand.

_Statement ends._


	10. The Lady in Red

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Savino Tello, regarding an ex. Original statement given in Italian and subsequently translated on February 11-12, 2012.
> 
> Statement begins.

The sight of her, the sound of her, still haunts me. It's a wonder I'm still alive, and not in prison, but...she doesn't remember me, anyway.

I've always lived a very busy life. I'm turning thirty soon, and I've spent most of the last ten years trying to claw up through various exhausting retail positions to a manageable salary. I've never really had a lot of time to relax or go clubbing or really just enjoy quality time with what few friends I had. My friend Martino was guilting me pretty badly about it, until I agreed to finally take a weekend with him. He was always wanting to drag me to some cabaret club he liked, so I told him I'd be down to join him.

The club he took me to, _La Sanguine_ , was a cozy enough little place. Food was expensive, so I stuck with some cheap wine. The stage acts were of a mixed variety, some comedy, some dramatic, some art. Martino seemed to be absolutely glazed over through all of it. This was really weird, considering he'd been pestering me about how good this place was. I mean, I wasn't blown away or anything, but I felt like I was having more fun than he was for the greater part of our stay. Around 10:30, I remember him getting antsy. At 10:45, he was definitely impatient. I figured he was waiting for his favorite act to come on, and I was proven right when he smacked me on the arm and told me to pay attention at 10:59.

The emcee was announcing the next act as 'Aura'. Aura was the name of a woman wearing a red dress who came out onto the stage to sing, and I immediately knew why exactly Martino was so enthused. First, she was drop-dead gorgeous. It was like she had walked out of a post-war 1950's swing act, but it _worked_. This brilliant, shimmering red dress, flowing around the perfect hourglass figure, and hair sleek and black falling down her back. Her eyes were magnetic, and the blush on her cheeks might've even been natural. But the thing about her that stunned me was her _voice_.

It was sultry and smoky and silken, and the way it sounded hitting your ears and felt when passing over your body...I know it was some love song she was singing, even if I can't remember the words. It moved you. It was hard to tear my eyes away from her, but when I looked around, I saw at once that she had everyone else, or at least every man in the bar, twice as mesmerized as I'd been. None of them could look away, and Martino across from me looked like he'd been shot by Eros. She was blowing the other acts out of the water.

Aura's song went on for a long time, but not long enough. I immediately agreed when Martino prompted me to say it had been worth coming here for a little down time. And I remember him nudging me on the way out while we walked to his car, and asking me if I didn't think she'd been looking his way every so often. I wasn't so sure about that, but I tried to be encouraging.

I didn't go back to La Sanguine for quite a while after that, since my overtimes just weren't permitting it. I still tried to meet up with Martino on occasion, and supported him when he started telling me he had landed a girlfriend, and I wouldn't believe who it was. Yes, he was dating Aura, and he was indeed over the moon about her. Eventually, however, my schedule opened up...which is to say an armed robber broke into our store and started firing, killing our manager and injuring several, after which I decided it wasn't worth it to work there anymore. It shut down the same week. So, that was me unemployed. Poor Martino, though...just the weekend after, I got word that he'd been shot in a freak act of violence, and had passed away. That devastated me...Martino and I had never been incredibly chummy the way he wanted, but we'd been friends for a long time, and he was closer to me than any of my other acquaintances. I'd probably have quit my job anyway, after that.

It didn't occur to me immediately to visit La Sanguine again, of course, but when it did and I sat down, a lot of stress relief was poured up into a bottle and downed. I needed money, and eventually the idea came to me to ask if they were hiring, and as it happened, they were. While I was up at the bar waiting for an application from the manager, I took a glimpse down the row of chairs and spotted a crimson dress. It was Aura--quietly sobbing over a champagne bottle. My heart felt for her almost as much as for Martino. She had to be going through something awful. I resolved to try and talk to her, if I got the job.

As it happened, I did get the job, bartending. It wasn't long after I had the chance to sit down and talk to her. She was pretty shaken up, and heartbroken, telling me all about how she had felt a real connection with Martino. It turned out her real name was Ophelia di Maggio, but she preferred her stage name. We talked about our various woes before she welcomed me to the team, hoping that I'd like her songs, since I'd be hearing them every evening we worked together.

Being the bartender, when I wasn't listening to various gossips that patrons thought I actually wanted to hear, I got to see and talk to a lot of the acts before they went on stage in the evenings, but somehow, Aura wasn't among them. She seemed to only come in a short time before her stage appearances to prepare, so I never had too much of a chance to talk before I heard her sing. Her voice was just as moving as it had been before, only now it seemed like the grief in her was powering her to sing even more passionately, suffusing her voice with more emotion than ever. It was sorrowful and beautiful and I remember being jealous that she had some way to express her troubles. Of course, just because she didn't show up very early didn't mean she didn't stay late. I got to see her whenever she took her evening drinks and socialized with the other acts and the patrons. Naturally, she was magnetic, every man in the place still eager to drink her in. She was never alone.

If I hadn't been so shaken up over my friend, I probably wouldn't have even spared the minor attempt at thinking bad of her that I did, when she was being 'comforted' by another man so soon after his death. My grief kept my mind at least somewhat clearer, I think. I was still trying to find out the details of what had happened to him, and what had possessed someone to kill my friend. The guy who did it was in prison and refusing visitors, but the police eventually told me that dubious witness reports and garbled testimonials indicated a crime of passion, perhaps romantically motivated.

Like I said, Martino and I had never been extremely close, but all the same, I knew him. And I knew him well enough to know he'd never put the moves on a taken woman. So was it just some crazed creep, entitled to have some pretty woman he'd seen at the club one evening? Surely that had to be it. You got plenty of unstable people who snap over being passed over by women, it made enough sense. It couldn't have been Aura...

Somewhere along the way, I could hear the truth bouncing around my skull. Telling me to stop watching her shows, to stop listening to her music, to open my eyes and wonder what had happened to the last man each time I saw the seductive scarlet singer with a new one wrapped around her. But I ignored it. By the time the thought even occurred to me, I was too taken in by her music to listen to it. I was falling for her, too. I was staring at her every time she got on stage, mesmerized, my curiosity turned to interest turned to desire. If I had just been quicker on the uptake, paid more attention, I would've noticed sooner what happened to any man who tried to approach her. All of them, killing themselves in despair, or killing rivals in impassioned rage, leaving her to do it all over again.

I wanted her, so badly. It was love, I knew it, but I'd never be able to approach her, even if I knew she was gazing at me from behind the mic. So it was her that approached me. I remember being so surprised that she sat down next to me, and how easily she turned the chat to her advantage, and even moreso that she wanted to ask me out. I was delighted. Her voice was music to me, leading me on even without a backing track, and I'd have done anything she asked. We both were off work the next day, so we arranged to meet and go out for dinner.

Everything from then until the next night when it happened is a blur. The date was good, great even, but I can't remember any details about it. What we ate, what we talked about, where we even went. Even though I know I took her home, and she invited me in, and we made love, and it was surely the greatest sex I've ever had in my life, I still can't seem to grasp any of it with any clarity. The only thing I remember cleanly is finding the box. Her box with the rings in it, each one a simple men's band, some with declarations of love engraved in them...Now that I'm looking back, this was the revelation. I should've immediately seen that I was in danger, and that this was evidence she was some sort of black widow, seducing men and then killing them...

But the only thing I could think was...she had lied to me.

She had _lied_ to me! I wasn't the only one--how many others? How many men had she taken in and _fucked_ , all while giving me the sex eyes every time she sung on stage, every time she flirted with me over drinks at the bar? She'd been lying to me since the beginning! The skank, the cheating whore...and my heart hurt, and pumped blood through my body, and heat clouded my brain, and I was grabbed a knife from her kitchen shelf before I knew to stop myself. She screamed while I did it, her blood soaking the sheets with each furious plunge of the blade...I don't know how long it took me to stop, or how many times I stabbed her, but she was long dead before I reached that point.

And then it all came crashing down. The spell I was under, it vanished, and I had to look at what I'd done. I was covered in her blood, and Aura was dead. Her corpse laid there on the bed, staring up at the ceiling with blank, sightless eyes. The smell of blood was everywhere, and I became aware of the faint music playing from the television.

At some point, I washed the blood off in her shower and left. I didn't know what else to do. Turn myself in? Bury and burn the body? Maybe I should just go to bed and work on trying to be normal while packing my things and leaving. On the other hand, I deserved the prison time that getting caught would land me. But none of that was necessary. See, when I went in to work that next evening, scared shitless and still not sure of what I would say when the topic came around to where Aura had vanished off to...I saw her again. Sitting at the bar, sipping her drink, like nothing had happened. She didn't even seem to remember that we'd gone out together the night before. She went onstage again to sing that night.

Obviously, I don't work there anymore. Quit the same night. I didn't stay to listen to the whole song.

But I can still hear her voice in my head. The spell was lifted, but it left me stained. I still want to go back and hold her, touch her, kiss her, strangle her... I don't care if you use this information to have me arrested. It would be nice, I think, to die resisting arrest. Even now I still have trouble remembering Martino, like my brain automatically skips him, probably because he's a liability. His memory and the knowledge of what must have happened to him, they get in the way of me loving her... I wonder if any of his things were in that box of hers.

I should go back...just to look...

_Statement ends._


	11. El Dorado

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Baxter Powell, regarding his smoking habit. Original statement given October 5th, 2015.
> 
> Statement begins.

I read the rules before I came in here, so I know statements regarding dreams are forbidden. Just know that while this one starts with a dream, it's more than that, okay? It's...integral to the story, is all, and besides, I've read some of your accepted statements, and I know the rules bend on occasion.

I have a rather large family, and most of them are arseholes. Mum and Dad are blatant bigots with bad tempers and loud voices, my sisters are drug-addicted college dropouts with a kid each, my brother spends his time watching neo-nazi programs and has two kids he's indoctrinating... Then you get to my aunts and uncles, who are stuck up and still act like their family is rich and better than everyone else even though all the wealth ran dry before reaching them. My nieces and nephews were sweet enough considering I'm not that fond of kids, but I had reason enough to worry for them.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm without flaw, but I like to think I'm a tad more well-adjusted than most of them. The family scenario I just described isn't as uncommon as people think, it's just that most of the time, they aren't all living under the same roof. For a short time, my house was full of these people.

I'm a loner. Peace and quiet are my best friends, so Mum and Dad alone would've been a trial. I'm not going to lie, I long since got over trying to love them in spite of their flaws when it was clear they didn't feel the same way. Moving out was my greatest wish, but it simply wasn't going to happen when I couldn't afford rent pretty much anywhere safe on the meager salary I made, and Dad was demanding a rent maybe a hundred dollars lower and then acting like my saving grace, being oh-so-generous by offering me something 'low' that still sucked away enough of my cash to keep me from ever saving up enough to leave. That was enough to make me feel trapped. Of course, then my oldest sister got pregnant and then dropped out of her courses and came to live here, along with her screaming newborn. Every hour that my parents weren't there, she most definitely was, blaring the tv playing hardcore porn and ignoring her child. My brother also moved back in around the same time, his girlfriend having gotten sick of his 'centrist' ideas and the creeps he hung out with, bringing his own two children with him. Now I had to listen to pundits and propadandists every morning and night, not to mention his fights with my sister where he called her a slut and told her God was going to send her to hell.

If it weren't for the kids, I probably would've blown my brains out with dad's hidden pistol before long. I could handle it, just barely, for their sake. I was the cool uncle, always playing board games with them and helping them with their homework, and babysitting them and the new baby on occasion when my schedule permitted it--always without pay or even a thank-you, as it happens. But I was scraping by on sanity as much as I was money. Every hour of my life was either spent away from home at my shitty underpaying job, or locked in my room at the house, interacting with the other occupants of my home as little as I possibly could. I was miserable, putting it frankly. Unfortunately, Christmas was approaching.

Autumn had just ended, and that was the worst. See, autumn is my favorite season, especially early into it. For just a few weeks, the weather is right, the sun shines and the wind blows, everything is nice and cool and the woods along our street look beautiful, orange and gold everywhere. I can go out in the afternoons just as the sun is setting and have a cigarette, and everything feels right, even though I can hear the shouting behind the back door. Being able to see the woods from the window in my room, it doesn't surprise me that I'd start fantasizing about living out there, away from everyone else, and just enjoying nature, nor does it surprise me that I'd started dreaming about it. It was just an occasional thing, back on September going into October, with perhaps a bit more frequency going into November. But, anyway, Christmas.

My family are traditional when it comes to holidays like Easter and Christmas. _Everyone_ has to show up, there has to be a big giant meal that the kids don't like and takes forever to clean up, and everyone has to watch old movies you get sick of after the hundredth time and sing carols and exchange gifts and every other damned thing. For our family, this meant a very large influx of people staying at the house even when it wasn't already over-crowded, as our aunts, uncles, and cousins showed up, and in this case, my younger sister showed up with her seven-year-old, too. This year, my cousins weren't coming--which, through the gossip about how awful and ungrateful they were, I guessed to be because they'd gotten sick of their families, too, and told them to shove it--but the rest made up the difference by showing up midway through November, far earlier than they needed to be to cook any turkey and ham or unwrap gifts. It was a goddamn nightmare.

I couldn't stand being at home, but I didn't have anywhere else to go. I didn't have any friends to take me in, and it was too close to the holidays to beg my coworkers to let me stay with _their_ families and make everything awkward. I was fighting with my siblings or parents at least once a week, and I was starting to get hearing damage from blasting music in my headphones to shut them out, not to mention my occasional cigarette had blossomed into a full-on addiction. My only reprieve was sleep, where I'd started having a very specific dream.

It was a dream of being out in the woods, the middle of nowhere, in that perfect picturesque autumn. Red and orange canopy covered the sky, letting down plenty of beautiful sunlight that bathed everything in gold. Ahead of me was a wooden cabin, still and silent, but looking perfectly welcoming and cozy. I would wonder, in my dream, what sort of person might live there, and what their life must be like. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that I had actually started lucid dreaming, and could walk around and take a closer look. It's a little funny, I suppose, but after dreaming of it a few times, I had the words 'El Dorado' pop into my head. You know, that mythical lost city made of gold, and the like? With all of the golden light surrounding the house in the woods, I guess it made sense to me. After a few successive dreams offered me escape from my everyday life, I moved ahead with deciding to open the front door of the house and peer inside.

It opened, unlocked and noiseless, and inside I found a nice little living room. Windows on both sides, a couch and a coffee table, and a table with an unlit lamp. What a funny thing to find there, I'd thought, since it would never be nighttime here. The rest of the house--well, it existed, but it's not pertinent to this story. I quietly walked over to the couch, feeling various surfaces along the way and finding them to be unimaginably real, and finally sat down. Surely, the owner of the house wouldn't mind?

There was no television, or other electronic form of entertainment, but there was a pack of cigarettes on the table, not to mention three or four notebooks full of scribbles in a familiar hand. There was also a scrapbook. Opening it up, I found 'property of Baxter Powell' written inside, and I realized this cabin belonged to me. Inside the scrapbook were dozens and dozens of pictures of me and my family, filling up all the slots. It was bizarre--we all looked happy in these pictures, and more importantly, I couldn't remember taking them, or being present for any of the ones I was in.

It was a few dreams of relaxing in this place, falling asleep on the dream cabin's couch and waking up to my real life later, that I just enjoyed it as fantasy. My own little fabricated world where I could get away from it all. But I couldn't sleep forever. It was after a particularly bad shouting match with my dad that I went back to my room and popped pills to force myself to sleep to get away from it all before I started crying. And I went back to my dream world, walking into my little cabin and letting the golden light wash out all my stress while I smoked a cigarette on that couch. And then I started flipping through the scrapbooks, and came across a picture that stopped me.

It was a photo of me, Mum, and Dad all hugging each other and smiling at the camera. At least, I think it was Dad. I recognized the clothes he was wearing, but his face was burnt out of the picture, a large hole through both the sleeve and the photograph ringed with burnt black film, showing the white back side of the picture behind it. I remember being vaguely disturbed, though not as much as I should have been, nor as much as I was when I woke up. It was screaming that woke me up, you see. It was late in the evening, and it turned out Dad had had a heart attack in the shower.

Well, after that, it was chaos. An ambulance was called, and everyone was sobbing and generally quiet for a change. I had a lot more to think about than they did, though. Naturally, I was wondering if my dad's death was somehow my fault, and the guilt started to eat away at me. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't sorry he was gone, although I'd never have told anyone at the house that. But I'd never wanted him to die, I just wanted to be away from him. And I guess now, I was.

I'd love to tell you this sobered everyone up and made them better people. But it didn't. Naturally, everyone that wasn't already squatting in our house had to come over and stay as well, bringing their stupid casseroles and tureens and whatnot. The arguments started up again, occasionally getting physical, while my aunts would whimper in the corner bleating that everyone should stop fighting and get along. I would've been able to slip under the radar of it all, were it not for Mum. She blamed me. Oh, I don't think she knew about the dream cabin. It was just that in her mind, I was the one that had gotten dad's blood pressure up with my spiteful, ungrateful ways, and thus that made me responsible for the heart attack he'd had. We had a few screaming matches, and I think those were the only times I'd ever been defended by anyone in my family as my sisters and an uncle begged Mum to see reason and not hurl such unwarranted vitriol at me. Well, that was refreshing, though a bit too little too late.

It was in pursuit of a smoke break at home one day when I discovered the cigarettes in the fridge. The new ones, the ones I didn't smoke, and neither did anyone else in the house. The packs were green, with a golden picture of an oak tree on the front, with the name 'El Dorado' underneath it. And when I found those, I knew. I knew that I had killed my Dad, accidentally or not, and that this wasn't a one-time thing. It was a power I had, and could use again...if I so chose.

I won't bore you with the struggles I went through of whether to embrace this power or not. In the real world, I was miserable. In the dream world, I was content...happy, even. And something told me that my happiness would vanish if I didn't keep fueling it. Burn something down to make something new with the ashes, that sort of thing. It took me only a month to decide.

It was the worst Christmas anyone in our family had ever had.

Just a week before Dad's funeral was to be held on New Years' Eve, I had taken a nap on my living room couch with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. In the subsequent dreamscape, I'd woken up inside the cabin, instead of having to walk up to it and go inside, and begun flipping through photos. I'd found one that seemed right, and slowly taken the cigarette that was still held between my lips and pressed it to the plastic sleeve. There was no shudder, no reflexive feeling, no immediate indicator that this had had any effect whatsoever. But I closed the scrapbook with the burnt photo, put the cigarette out in the ash tray, and turned over and gone back to sleep, waking up later that day to the news that Mum had had a car crash. The funeral arrangements were hastily made after the shockwave of grief passed, and she was arranged to have a double funeral and double casket-lowering with Dad.

The second death finally drove out all of the visiting family, some I think due to suspecting the property might be cursed. The housing association visited to discuss who would continue living in the home, and I was the only one to say yes. My brother and sisters collectively probably made enough money to stay here, but I didn't care to convince them to stay when they all decided living in this house was too painful and that they'd rather go stay with the various aunts and uncles offering to take them in. When asked how I was going to make ends meet, I just waved them off, saying I'd just have to take on more hours at work. Eventually, I was left alone to enjoy the full peace and solitude of a new year.

Mortgage was difficult, as it was a bit steeper than the rent I'd been paying, but I scraped by skimping on the water bill. I don't need water, or food, you see--after the deaths of Mum and Dad, furnishings started to appear in my dream cabin, counting a shower, a kitchen, and a fridge, the latter always stocked. I figured another death or two might solve any entertainment problems, but I didn't need to test that one. I saved up and was able to get a generator to power the house, so all I had to pay was an internet bill--I don't do cable, and watched anything I wanted online. Saving isn't easy, but I can at least do it. I also don't have to pay for cigarettes anymore, for that matter.

I killed my brother in February. Well, I didn't actually kill him--a bunch of black men he was antagonizing beat him to death, and I don't know if it was my cursed scrapbook that did it or not, but I'm happy to take credit for it. Fucking nazi. From what I heard, no one came to his funeral. The aunt he was staying with took his kids in, and while she might be a stuck-up bitch, she'll hopefully do better at raising kids than he was.

I could stop this at anytime, I think. But I don't want to. I've been experimenting with my powers--my scrapbook can create photos of anyone I've seen, and let me tell you, I've seen plenty of awful people no one would miss. I don't want to give up El Dorado's power. It's given me freedom and peace and comfort that I never had before. The season is turning, and my life at home is starting to look just like the cabin in my dreams.

_Statement ends._


	12. Morph

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Isobel Santiago, regarding an infestation. Original statement given January 15th, 2014.
> 
> Statement begins.

I had lived in my flat for about a month before I started noticing the bugs.

I have always hated bugs. I'm not the cleanest person their ever was, my mum and her complaints about my room growing up could confirm that. But I'm not a slob, either, and you wouldn't catch me dead with ants or flies in my home, let alone roaches. So when I started to realize the seams of my new home were showing more and more signs of insect life, I was not taking it well.

I don't have any pets, so the instinct I went with, once I finally realized my place was crawling with ants and moths and my shoes and coats weren't safe, was to blast the bastards with pesticides. Line every surface with poison until I probably would've benefited from a gas mask in my own place, then wash the hell out of all of my clothes and clear out my fridge. And, of course, that didn't work. Well, it did work, but not for very long--the bugs were gone for only a few days before they came back.

This had me both stumped and frustrated. I knew it wasn't just me, but this _was_ a new area, and maybe my prior level of cleanliness hadn't been enough to adapt to the flat I was occupying. Not that I could see how the bugs were getting in, or even what was attracting them. I didn't want to suspect my neighbors; I'd made the rounds when moving in here, and they all seemed to be very nice people, even the somewhat distant ones, and none of them seemed, from what few glances of their homes I'd gotten, to be slovenly.

I put up with this for a couple of weeks, alternating pesticides and blasting the place, until I started to get sick, and realized I was fighting a battle I couldn't win. I just couldn't understand it. Were they getting in behind the stove, or the fridge? Were they hiding in nests inside the sofa and chairs? I checked thoroughly and I couldn't find out. I eventually got over my fear of being perceived as rude and started going around to my neighbors, asking if any of them were having pest problems. I checked in with Bradley Morris, Sylvia Guerra, Rory Pollard, Lola Greer, and Amina Davis, but all of them were very up-front and sympathetic, swearing they hadn't had any pest problems and didn't see how it could be related to them. Rory Pollard, my next-door neighbor, was the only one I suspected. He was perfectly polite, if a little timid and nervous-looking, but...good Lord, he was in a state. Very visibly disheveled and dirty, to the point I wondered if he was in the throes of some sort of addiction. But he told me that he honestly hadn't had any pest problems whatsoever, and advised me to take it easy on pesticides if they weren't working, especially if it was impacting my health. I thanked him...and he blurted out just as I was turning, would I like to go somewhere with him. I politely told him I was not in a good mental state right now, and not ready for dates. Awkward.

So I dealt with this for a while until I had saved up enough for a fumigator. I was no stranger to landlords and their idea of generous service, so I didn't expect him to pay for it, but I did slip a notice under his door of the date and time I'd be having my apartment bombed, and warning him that if any insect-related damages were found, he would be liable, not me. After that, I just had to wait it out, disinfecting every last thing and just sort of accepting the bugs as my roommates while quietly waiting for their extermination.

The day came, and I took to a hotel for a couple days--double checking that there had been no reports of bed bugs--while the flat was bombed. When it was all over with, I assured myself, I'd return to a pest-free home. I enjoyed my time away, even treating myself to some good food now that I didn't have to worry about contaminants. And when I finally did go home, it was to a mostly empty house. I admit, I felt a big anticipation as I walked up to my front door, picked up my mail, and went inside, but I wasn't expecting what I found.

For the most part, it was nothing. I even sighed in relief, thinking at first that I'd finally defeated my problems as I tiptoed around my foyer and kitchen, finding candy shells of dead ants along the walls and flies and moths lining the windowsills where they'd tried to escape. It was being revealed to me just how many unwanted guests had been in my home, and I was reveling in finally being free of them when I walked into my living room and saw it: a butterfly.

It was impossible to miss, so boldly out there that I had the funny thought that it must've been on purpose. It was a big, bright blue butterfly, perched on the lamp on the table beside the sofa. It was very clearly still alive, as I saw its wings beat once. I set my mail down on the coffee table and inched closer.

Mind, I'm not big on butterflies. I mean, they're much nicer to look at than other bugs, and generally not any sort of threat or pest, but that doesn't mean I want them around me. And for the life of me, if I was confused on how tiny ants had been getting into my home, it was nothing to the confusion I felt on how a rather large, solitary butterfly had found its way in. I hadn't left any windows open, had I? I went and opened the window, unwilling to get too close to it, but as it didn't move, I went to get my flyswatter. It flapped agitatedly as I approached, and I got pretty spooked, but I held it out, and to my immense relief, it crawled onto the flat end and sat still as I carefully tiptoed over to the window, sat the flyswatter outside, and closed the window.

Unfortunately, that was not the last I saw of the butterflies. Each day, waking up or coming home from work, there would be one or two, waiting in my living room or laundry room. Then three...then four. They were extremely nonthreatening, but I still took a long while to warm up to them. After the first few times setting them outside, they would flutter out of the window on their own, once I opened it. These little bugs' behaviors were bizarre, and freaking me out a bit. They almost seemed to be intelligent, always there but never getting in my way, and leaving when it was clear I wanted them gone. If it hadn't been so damned strange, I might've actually liked the company. I had to admit, they were beautiful little bugs, and a vast improvement over the moths and flies. But I didn't get the chance to fully settle in to the fact that I had more guests.

One day, when trying to politely move a rather stubborn butterfly, and trying to get it to wander onto the flyswatter, my elbow bumped against the large painting that was hung on the wall of the living room. And this...thing fell out. It scared the shit out of me, and took my attention off of the butterfly for a good minute. Something had fallen from behind the painting, and as I peered closely, I realized that it was a mass of dead insects. Mostly moths, some ants, even some spiders. I almost puked then and there. Little insect carcasses littered the back of the rather large painting when I took it off the wall, and that wasn't the only thing I'd found.

There were holes in the wall behind the painting, several of them. Some bigger than others, but all of them big enough to fit a thumb into. I counted seven holes in total--all of them seemingly chewed or burrowed through wood and plaster, and all of them extended all the way through the wall, into what would be my neighbor Rory Pollard's flat. I hesitantly pressed my eye to one and saw a clear view of his bathroom, which was absolutely filthy but unoccupied. It was abundantly clear now how the bugs had been getting in, but I wondered whether to confront him about it. This weird situation just kept getting weirder--why were the bug bodies all clustered behind the painting, but none filling the holes they had to have used to get in? I realized that they must have been trying to get back out to the other side when the fumigators bombed the place. Of course, if other bugs had been coming through, it made sense they'd have pushed any dead insect matter back out...but my house had been pest-free for over a week now. I was right livid with Rory, but I wasn't about to take him to task for this yet. First I needed to figure out if the butterflies were getting in the same way, and what to do about it if they were. Were they contaminated, if so? Poisonous?

I'd always been able to hear noises from the neighbors in this flat. It's inescapable when you rent. But I noticed that, with the painting no longer covering the insects' prior entry route, I could hear a lot clearer what Rory got up to. When he brushed his teeth, when he showered, when he opened the squeaky cabinet mirror. I never made anything of it, usually just turning my television up while peering at the holes warily. But no more bugs ever came through. The only time I actually took an interest in what was happening on the other side was when I heard Rory say very clearly 'it's okay darling, come in'. If Rory had a girlfriend, I'd be amazed, with the state of his flat. Not to mention I wouldn't envy the poor woman. But I peered through one of the holes with the clearest view, and...he was alone. He was sitting in his shower stall, wearing only shorts, seemingly murmuring to himself. It was downright weird.

I let it go after that. I'm not some creepy peeper, and I kind of doubted Rory was, because there wasn't exactly a way for him to watch me unawares, or at least not do so and find me doing anything interesting. But there was one time when I just couldn't help myself. It was early in the morning, and I was on my period, so I wasn't in the best of comforts and had gotten up at about three a.m. for a variety of reasons, and after tending to myself in the bathroom and peeing, I went to go get myself some medicine from my kitchen cabinet to go back to sleep with. And walking in from the hall, I heard this... _moaning_. It had to be Rory. And my first thought was disgust. _Really_ , guy? Rubbing one out, that loudly, at three in the freaking morning? But as I listened closer, I started to get worried. Some of those moans and grunts didn't exactly sound like the friendly neighborhood creeper having one off. I wondered if he might be in pain, or even injured, so I went against my instincts and walked slowly over to the holes in the wall, where the sound was loudest. The sight is going to haunt me forever.

Rory was crouched down in his shower stall, butt naked and facing away from the wall. He was holding himself tightly and shuddering, and sometimes twitching, and the reason why was abundantly clear: his back was covered in...something. It was almost hollowed out, with these wriggling _things_ hanging from the inside. Thank god I'd just gone to the bathroom and hadn't swallowed anything yet, because I'd have vomited and he probably would have known. I couldn't tear my eyes away, even though I wanted to. The wriggling...things, they started to pulse, and crack open, and I saw something crawl out of one of them. I realized that those were cocoons attached to the inside of his back, chrysalises or whatever you called them, when the thing that crawled out of one shivered and started to unwrap a pair of bright blue wings.

Tears actually started coming down my face, I was so scared and grossed out, but I kept watching. One by one, the pupae in Rory's back opened and the butterflies crawled out, some staying in his skin, and others flitting off to nearby surfaces. He was sighing and breathing hard like he'd just finished a run, and when he held out a finger, one of the butterflies landed on it, and he spoke to it. And...and he said, "It's okay, sweetie, of course she's going to like you. How could she not? You're so beautiful, she's bound to love you."

I didn't sleep. My first thought was to tape over the holes the butterflies would be using to get in, but then he'd know. I went and locked myself in my room, stuffing towels into the cracks between the walls and the door and then going to dry heave in the bathroom. The sun was well up before I braved going back outside. And then there they were, my little host of butterflies, looking as pretty as if they hadn't been waiting for me covered in a membrane of Rory's flesh just a few hours ago.

Do you remember me mentioning my mail? The thing is, I never opened it. I never get mail except for adverts or coupons, so I've never bothered to open what I get. Ordinarily I throw anything I get away, but I'd gotten so distracted by the butterflies when I came home after the fumigation that I'd just let them sit on my coffee table, forgotten, and never gotten around to opening them. I dodged as widely as I could around the butterflies, and went through my mail. Sure enough, among the usual garbage was an unmarked paper without an envelope. Here, I've got it with me now, I'll read it to you.

"im sorry you didnt like the last ones i sent. ill send prettier things over this time, so please dont kill them".

The picture came together. Of course the butterflies had come from the same place as the bugs and I'd been stupid to assume they might not have. None of the pesticides I'd been spraying had had any effect because the real entry point was hidden behind the painting, so they never took until I had the place bombed. When the fumes escaped through the wall and got into Rory's place, he must've finally gotten the picture that I didn't like his little 'gifts' and opted to change tact.

Fucking Rory...what the _hell_ is he?

Well, obviously I couldn't stay there. Made up some dumb excuse to my landlord about a family member needing urgent care and thus, I'd be moving out, vacating the flat as soon as I was physically able, and I haven't returned.

It's just...that's sick! I'm not the only one who thinks that's sick, right?! I mean...yeah, I occasionally look back and wonder if it was harsh to spray every last butterfly I found with Raid in the single day leading up to my departure, but still! What sort of freak was he, with his body hosting bugs like that? What sort of crazy was he, to think I'd like my house filled with bugs crawling all over my things?!

Urgh, just recalling this story is making me sick to my stomach. I'm leaving now.

_Statement ends._


	13. Haze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Corey Hayes, regarding his own disappearance. Original statement given May 23rd, 2013. Transferred from the Usher Foundation June 11th, 2013.
> 
> Statement begins.

Although I haven't died, I was, for a short time, a ghost. If you were to look up news reports about me, you'd get something like 'Texas University Haunted by Spirit of Hazed Student'. The truth is, though, I didn't die, I just vanished.

Living in Texas when you're not white and straight is about the worst thing imaginable, especially if you're not physically imposing enough to make people have second thoughts about harassing you. High school is an experience I'd like to forget thanks to this, but college, even though it initially looked like it was going to be easier, was almost as bad. I was encouraged by the few friends I had made to try and subvert the things I was going through by joining a fraternity. I told them this was a stupid idea, but they kept at it, insisting I'd be less of a target if I could convince the local group of white frat boys to take me in as their own and shield me as a brother. There were a couple fraternities at my university, none of them crossing over too much with my psych studies, but when I gave in and thought to give it a try, Delta Gamma Pi is the one I chose to try my hand at.

I honestly don't feel like pondering if things would have gone better at the other fraternity. I'd say I don't want to go into details about the hazing I went through, but I brought the paper clippings, so you already have them. The part that matters is, it was traumatic, and after it ended, I just wanted to never be seen again. I wanted to be alone, and disappear. I left the campus, and went back home after wandering outside in the dark for an hour, hoping to avoid my parents and having to explain myself. I cried myself to sleep, and woke up early the next morning feeling exhausted. I took off class for the day, and didn't eat or talk to anyone at all. The next day, I gathered myself, and drove to the campus.

It took me longer than you might think to realize that I had gotten my wish. I just thought that it was odd that I hadn't seen anyone else on the road on the way to class, and figured I must be late. Then, I actually got to the campus full of its parked cars, and walked into my first class, which was totally empty, so I figured maybe I was early. I sat down in my seat, and time started to wear on, and as I looked at the clock, I wondered if today was just a holiday and I hadn't realized. I'd been sitting there an hour when I realized that no one was coming, and that I may as well go get a snack while I waited for my next class to start. But there was no one at the vendor cafe, either, and it started to dawn on me that it had been two days since I'd seen another living soul.

I wandered around the whole campus, trying to find someone. Even if it were a holiday, there would still be people in the offices doing paperwork, right? But I didn't find a single person there. Feeling weirded out and a little scared, I got back in my car and left campus, driving all around town to try and find people. I never did. Cars would be parked at every lot and on every street, but none were ever moving, nor was anyone ever occupying them. No one in the shops, restaurants, apartments, anywhere. I returned to campus and went to go sit out on the concrete. I wandered around for the entire day, trying to process that I was now alone in the world. At first, I was terrified. Had something awful happened to everyone else? Were they all dead? And what about me? How was I going to eat? What was my life going to be now? My family and friends were gone. My classes were now impossible to attend and I couldn't learn or work.

Of course, after I got over that, I actually welcomed the new, people-less world I found myself in. I had escaped! I didn't have to worry about anyone mistreating me ever again! I didn't have to explain why I'd been so scarce, I didn't have to turn in any difficult assignments, I didn't have to do anything I didn't want to do! Once I found my new freedom, I reveled in it. I raided fridges whenever I was hungry, I played tons of video games online--even though there was never anyone present on the internet to play with--I blasted music as loud as I wanted, I drove doughnuts in the campus parking lot...There was no one who could hurt me, and nothing I did would hurt anyone else, so why not?

I escalated my fun even further. I sprinted naked up and down campus doing cartwheels. I found the dorms where the fraternity captain stayed and pissed on his pillow. I had a one-man cookout at midnight with all of the food I'd stolen from the store. I spray painted 'WHORE' on my cheating ex-girlfriend's car. I stole tons of high-power electronics and downloaded all the porn I could ever want to watch. I found the dean's secretary's computer and changed all the grades around. And I did all of this before learning that the world I'd found myself in wasn't static.

There was never any real sign that other people were around me, but things would change from day to day, and as I paid closer attention, hour to hour. After being away from something for a while, I'd check back and find it in a different place, and occasionally devices were on or cars were parked in different places. At first I didn't make anything of it, but I realized that maybe everyone in the world hadn't just vanished. Maybe they were...how do I put this? Behind a veil? I entertained the theory of me being surrounded by ghosts for a while before discarding it, and to test it out, I got hold of a phone I found lying around. I kept it in my pocket for a day, but going through the texts and alerts, I didn't find anything new. After putting it back where I got it, I tried it with cars I recognized and food instead, observing to see how they changed throughout the day. I eventually realized cars were appearing and vanishing in accordance with the same old schedule I'd followed every day, with people presumably arriving and leaving as they took their classes, and food would vanish from certain refrigerators and be replaced with leftovers.

I started to wonder about my own mental state, of course, and after that I wondered about the world I was in, and if I was in some grant plot where things were being hidden from me. I considered that perhaps there were 'ripples' affecting the world in everyday ways to keep up a sort of facade, but then decided the likelier thing was that I was simply cut off from everyone else and was getting after-images of what they were doing. It made my brain hurt, but I resolved to be more careful with my expressions of ultimate freedom from there on out.

Of course, it still took me a long, long time to tire of the new world I'd found myself in. I honestly didn't much miss other people. I wasn't happy, but I wasn't miserable either. I was...content. Yeah, I missed my mom and dad and my friends, and I missed doing things with other people, but I surprised myself with how good I was at simply not thinking about those things. I spent no less than six months living away from other people and animals, enjoying what I felt was a reward for enduring hell. I spent a lot of time outside, since I didn't bother worrying too much about deadlines or rules, or even the weather. I enjoyed the sun a lot. And then, of course, the seasons started to change.

I don't know how it is for you over here, but Texas is a true representation of the sweltering south. Hot as balls in the summer--though, less so once I had woken up alone, and I suspect that to be due to a lack of heat generated by human life. It takes a long time for fall to hit, and when it does, it's amazingly cool and pleasant for two or so weeks before going right back to hot as balls. And then midway through November, the temperature drops such that it's freezing in the morning and in the mid-sixties by noon. Winter is more about rain than snow, and fog is so rare some people here can't remember the last time they saw it. But by the time the cooler parts of fall showed up, fog was starting to become a regular occurrence, which I thought was the weirdest thing I'd yet seen. The temperature started to drop, too, much more quickly and steadily than I was used to. By the time of December, it was actually snowing, which was the furthest thing from normal.

The conditions inside were slower to change than the ones outside, but they steadily got less welcoming, as well. I was finding less food in the various fridges I ate from, and less in the stores when I went to get more. After noticing for a while that things had become sparse, I went to one Kroger and found absolutely nothing stocking the shelves, and at that point I started to worry. The lack of ambient heat was becoming frigid and unwelcoming at the dorms, and I couldn't shake the chill no matter what I absorbed myself in. The heaters stopped working, and the clothes I wore--and stole--started to become frayed and torn. The fog continued to roll in, obscuring more and more of the world around me, until I couldn't see but maybe ten feet in front of my face. It didn't scare me, I don't think. I didn't sit there wondering what might be waiting in the mist, but rather ate at myself knowing there was no one out there in it.

It's weird to say it, but, I think I entered a sort of cycle. As I started to think more about what I missed, the world started to become less fruitful. As the glow faded and problems started to arise, I missed my friends and family more, and the more I did that, the worse everything around me got. Eventually, I was downright miserable, and I started to openly miss my old life. And I dreaded the knowledge that it was never coming back. I was going to just sink deeper and deeper into fog and snow until I was consumed by it.

The weirdest thing was, I actually started to miss my brother. My older brother had gone off to the military ages ago, and I usually never remembered he existed. I had remembered how awful it would be to swallowed up in the fog, dying without ever knowing if he'd made it home. It was because of him that I'd decided early on to go into psychology courses, reasoning that if he ever came home traumatized, I could become a therapist to help him through it. I missed my friends, by now having let go of the residual anger at them for pushing me to join the fraternity, and I missed my parents terribly. But it was the memory of my brother that, for some reason, pulled at the hook embedded deepest in my mind. When I finally felt like I was going to die in a world made of cold nothing, I finally went back home, striding into my house and walking up to my bedroom. I laid down and cried myself to sleep one last time.

The next morning, of course, was when I woke up. From my sleep, and my changed world. Everything was back to normal.

Well, not 'normal'. I was back in the real world, and my mother screamed when she found me safe and sound. I found out, over the course of the next day, that I had been missing ever since the day of my hazing. Just vanished into thin air. My university had become the site of apparent hauntings by what was rumored to be my vengeful spirit, what with all of the ripples my effects in the other world had had in this one. That wasn't so much alarming as funny. What was absolutely awful to find out, though, was that my dad was in prison. See, he'd heard about what I'd went through, and when he found out the college hadn't punished the fraternity pledges, he went and hunted down the 'ringleader' everyone had been implicating and beat him to death.

Turns out my brother came home to mourn my 'death', so I still had him and Mom and their great relief at seeing me again. I was paid damages by the university, which I'm now trying to use to work on Dad's prison situation, although I can't see how I'm going to get him out of a murder charge. My story so far is that I was kidnapped, and drugged so heavily that I don't remember anything about the last six months. It's all I can really do.

I feel much closer to my friends and family now, though the disconnect between myself and everyone else keeps widening. I'll have to work on that, is all. I've decided to continue my college courses, but I'll be doing them from home now.

_Statement ends._


	14. Cast Iron

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Owen Knight, regarding his stay as a security guard at the Camus Absurd Art Museum. Original statement given December 2nd, 2017. 
> 
> Statement begins.

I have always, always loved art. Ever since I was a kid, it's been my dream to become an artist and have my work displayed in a museum. And despite the fact that my art career wasn't taking off the way I had hoped by my mid-twenties, I thought that taking a job as a security guard might at least get me some relevant experience for when I finally did skyrocket in the field. Get me in the good books of some of the right people, you know?

I'm a fairly well-built guy, and even though I wasn't much for fighting, I wasn't totally unfamiliar with it, so it seemed like a safe bet. Besides, I had my doubts that I'd actually need to get into any scruples to defend the artwork at the Camus Absurd. It wasn't a tiny museum, of course, but it was sort of...fringe. Its audience wasn't small, nor huge, and that was probably going to stay that way due to the fact that it focused on highly new-age, philosophical art works. Nothing in there appealed to so many people that it was worth stealing. Funnily enough, they did have one hallway reserved for 'classical works' that covered everything from cave art, to Michelangelo, to Banksy. Banksy! Shoved to the back in a 'classical' section!

I was a night shift security guard, which meant I had the best job possible, as I didn't even half to deal with hyper-active toddlers and rude teenagers and the occasional middle-school idiot thinking vandalism is funny. Though Mum certainly snubbed her nose at me going after my dreams 'the back door' way, she did agree that I seemed to have stumbled on some easy money. All I had to do was patrol a few corridors with a torch, make sure every door was locked and that every bit of art was accounted for and undamaged, and keep in touch with the watchman running the security cams. All in all, I was getting paid to do all of nothing.

The job was actually very boring, frankly. The other patrolmen--Barry, Angeline, and Kestrel--certainly agreed with me on that front. I rarely saw the others, but when I did, it was usually so they could ask me if I wanted to take over their patrol for an hour or two while they had some coffee and did the crossword. Barry was particularly bad about this, completely ignoring August, the camera watchman, when he got on his case over the radio. He'd first offered me a porn magazine to bribe me with, but being unmoved by the pictures of naked women being brandished my way, I'd offered to settle for a couple of candy bars he could buy me from the vending machine. I was always happy to take over certain patrols, since it afforded me to look at more of the art. I was definitely less interested in most of the exhibits, which I usually found to be a bit tacky and uninspired, than the 'Classical' section that the museum seemed willing to damn with faint praise.

I eventually started bringing my sketchbook. August would get on my case when I sat down to try and practice my anatomy next to the cast-iron fakes of famous statues, but I didn't get too upset with him. I knew he didn't really care about what we did and was mostly just putting on airs of being the responsible one so no one else had to. For the record, I liked August. We'd chatted a bit over radio, and after he teased me a bit for being 'gay and artsy', he'd actually take an interest in what I put in my sketchbook. None of it was all that interesting, but I did like to talk about art, and my favorites among history, and how I hoped to make something as famous as the statue of David or the Mona Lisa one day.

It can be a bit eerie, when you're alone in a dark room with a bunch of artwork, torch casting a bunch of shadows everywhere, and feeling like all the art is staring at you. The famed 'Curse of the Mona Lisa' is all the worse that way, especially since her portrait sits at the very end of the long hall. I did have to be a little brave if I was going to hang out around the art I actually liked. You can freak yourself out if you're not careful. I...don't think that's what happened to me, I definitely think what happened was very real, but it's not like I can prove it. That's why I'm here giving this statement. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Once I got used to the place, it was very easy to patrol just long enough that August would swallow the whole 'legs are tired' bit long enough for me to sit down on a platform and sketch something nearby. My favorite things to practice with were the Rodins. You know, the _Thinker_ , the _Kiss_ , the _Gates of Hell_? I've always liked his approach to the human figure. Just as dramatized as the Renaissance men, but a bit more fluid, adds a little bit of extra realism. The one I was most focused on studying was the _Thinker_. The black iron worked really well for it, added a lot of human weight to it. I would take twenty to thirty minutes at a time and sketch part of the statue from one angle, then several others, and then I would try and draw the whole thing from scratch without looking at it. When I went back and tried it again during the day at home, I usually felt more confident in my form. I eventually filled up my sketch pad, and August would tease me for all but writing love letters to a chunk of metal, and I would in turn tease him for spending all of his time with his camera trained on me.

Things went on in this very comfortable vein for quite a while, but then occasional disturbances started to pop up. The first one was a daytime security guard signing in and finding a broken window. All of us from the night shift were called in to answer for it, since we were the only ones who could've seen it happen. We were all very confused, as none of us had seen or heard anyone breaking and entering. None of the artwork had been vandalized or stolen, and most curiously of all, the window had been broken from the inside, glass scattering on the grass outside, implicating us all in property damage. But since we all vouched for one another and swore we hadn't seen anything, our pay was all docked for the next check to cover the repair cost. I remember Barry and Angeline muttering under their breaths about that.

It was after that that I started to notice the...discrepancies. See, I spent a lot of time drawing pictures of the artworks I saw, but I didn't tend to complete a single picture in any one night. I'd have loved to, but that would've been shirking my duties way too much. At first, I thought I was imagining it, that I was just slipping up when my sketch from one night didn't quite line up to the exact thing I'd sketched the night before. Just tiny little things, so barely different as to be easily dismissed. Although I would've sworn the _Thinker_ 's hand was tilted just a little offways the one time, to the point I got on the radio and bothered August about it, who got amused and told me I was going to start measuring its iron eyebrows next. If the rest of the spooky stuff that followed hadn't happened and it had just tapered off after that, I'd be able to say I was just losing my head a little, but that wasn't all that happened.

The next week, Angeline called out sick to work. I was informed I'd be taking over her shift for the week, and I was happy to do it. Hey, more hours for me. I didn't have any reason to suspect anything at the time. She and I weren't very close, although she'd been nice enough. By complete coincidence, taking over her shifts put me in contact with the Classical section of the museum on an official on-the-clock basis, which I didn't mind, although my infatuation with the Renaissance art wasn't such that I found this to be a huge glowing upgrade. I just did a lot more playing on my phone, is all. I remember leaving my sketchbook on a plinth to go take a piss, and while I was washing up, my phone vibrated in my pocket. It was from an unknown number, and it read 'Do I look fat on this'. It was...honestly just baffling. I obviously assumed 'on' was a typo, and I radioed August asking if he recognized the number I called out to him, and he confirmed that that was Angeline's number, and she must have contacted me by mistake. I was still pondering this when I nearly went sprawling, because the sole of my boot rolled on my pencil on the ground, which was about two feet from where I'd left it. No big deal, must've just rolled off the plinth. And when I picked up my sketch pad, there was a little heart drawn next to my latest sketch. I knew I 'd heard footsteps coming back from the bathroom, and I muttered 'fucking Barry' to myself as I tried to erase it. August snickered over the radio.

Angeline didn't return to work the next week, and I was informed that I'd just have to alternate with Kestrel in taking over her shifts until a new hire was made. Alright, I expressed a bit of worry, asked my boss to give her my condolences, but whatever. Things continued to proceed as normal during the night shifts, until mid-October, when during the evening before a shift, I woke up to a text from another unknown number, reading 'Missing you' with a heart emoji. I was obviously confused, as I wasn't seeing anyone, and opted not to bother with telling them they'd gotten the wrong number unless they texted again. It wasn't Angeline's number, and I didn't know whose else's it might be.

I know all of this is making me sound a bit dumb, but you have to understand, to me, it didn't happen all at once the way you're hearing it in this statement. A lot of time passes and details that are just odd in the moment stay that way instead of syncing up in your brain.

There was another supposed breaking and entry that night, again with a window smashed outward, and management was furious with us, snottily telling us she was considering just dropping all of us from the roster for being too incompetent at our jobs--if we weren't outright abusing our positions to sell off valuable artworks. _Yeah right, lady, whatever_ , I thought. That shift, though, was the last I saw of Kestrel. We were working the same night for a change, so it was the most I had seen of him up to that point, and I remember him steadily seeming more and more jumpy whenever we met up or chatted over the radio. Got real snappy with me once, and another time, he jumped a mile when I spoke to him. He wouldn't tell me what was wrong, but it was obvious something was spooking him. News came to me the night after that he had quit.

Well, that meant Barry had to finally get off of his ass and do his shifts, since it was just the two of us now. His mood went from indifferent to sour really quickly, to be honest. I hadn't thought that he valued standing around watching porn near the front desk that much. I just told him to watch where he was going and not get too distracted by the big-breasted babes, and he snapped at me to mind my own damn business. This kept up for a while. And during this time, I had to admit that I was starting to get a little spooked myself. August eventually noticed how much more chatty I'd become over the radio, and asked what the deal was, and I admitted to him that sometimes it seemed like the artwork was moving around, or looking at me. He told me to chill out and stop imagining things, of course. But I definitely couldn't shake the feeling. Every once in a while, I'd swear one of them glanced at me, and when I turned the torch on the painting or statue, it would look exactly as it was supposed to.

Two weeks after Kestrel had quit, I walked into my shift that night to find no one at the check-in desk to welcome me besides Laura, the receptionist who was just packing up her things. I collected my radio and asked for August, who piped up, and I asked if Barry had signed in yet. He told me Barry was just running a bit late and to continue my shift as usual. So, bar the voice in my radio, it was just me that night, until such time as the other patrolman decided to show up. But by now, my brain was putting some pieces together for me, enough to make me just a little bit more nervous than usual when doing my patrols. Angeline had never come back, and Kestrel had quit. What if Barry never showed back up?

And he didn't. I'd been in there for two hours, by myself, when I circled back to the reception desk, and immediately knew something was wrong. The lamps were off, and those weren't supposed to go out all night. The expression on my face must've betrayed me, and I thought, only for a second, that I heard laughter in the distance. Seconds later, I was reassuring myself that it was nothing, as I pointed my torch down the hall and asked who was there, gripping my baton in the other hand tightly. August piped in on the radio, asking me if everything was alright, and I asked him why the lights were out. Turns out, he said, that we'd just had a power outage. About half his cameras had just gone down, with the other half not responding, and that meant he needed my help to watch what was going on in certain rooms. Somehow I dreaded what was coming next, but I offered to help.

"Alright Owen," he said, and then he directed me to the first room I was to check. I was led all over the museum, swinging my torch here and there, and reporting back that nothing was wrong, from one corner of the building to another. At last, he told me he needed me to check the Classical hall. I didn't want to go there. I knew from experience that it was the one room that, despite how fond of it I had been before, was now going to run my heart rate up worse than ever. But I couldn't think of a good excuse to avoid it, so I weakly told him I'd head over there, and he asked me if I was scared. I admitted I was, and he told me that he'd be happy to vacate the office just for tonight and meet me in the hall to help me patrol. That was a big relief to me. I could use a shoulder to lean on, at this point.

And I walked down there, and he asked me to report back what I was seeing, and I told him everything was normal, even though it wasn't. The faces on the statues, they were...off. I could tell that much, in the instants before I looked away, as though my eyes would be burned from looking at them for too long. One of them had just moved, hadn't it? Was it the _David_? Or the _Zuccone_? The statues made of metal were worse than the marble ones. They blended in with the shadows cast by the torch, and made me screw my eyes up trying to determine if they were moving, or if the hand controlling the light was just shaking. I strode down the hall, and August radioed in saying he'd be there soon. I didn't hear any footsteps. I radioed back asking where he was, and he said that he was close, as he could hear my voice. I kept in contact, looking around for him, but not finding him. I was over near the Rodin works, now, and it was eerily silent every single time the radio went off.

"August," I asked, "are you in the right place? I can't see you."

And he told me that he was right here. He was close by. "Just look with your eyes, Owen." he said. "You're not blind, are you?" he asked me. "Ah, sorry," he said, "I forget you've never seen what I look like."

And a chill went down my spine as I finally realized what those words meant. He was right. I had never actually met August in person, and had no idea what he looked like. All I knew of him was a voice on my radio. I had never actually seen what happened to Angeline, or Kestrel, or Barry...and I scanned the faces of the statues around me one by one, all of them looking familiar.

"Just turn around, Owen." I heard, from over my shoulder, the radio still silent. I turned, looking wide-eyed at the cast-iron statue behind me, that of my favorite, the _Thinker_. As I watched, it turned its gaze towards me and sat up, reaching out a hand. And August's voice told me he was happy to see me again.

I booked it and ran. I sprinted back down the hall, hearing heavy weights hitting the floor behind me and seeing each piece of artwork turn its head towards me as I got away. I didn't bother going all the way around the building to the front door, and just leapt through a window. I had to be examined later and had to have surgery to get some of the glass shards out, but I ran and did not stop running until I was dozens of miles away from that building.

I still get too scared to sleep sometimes. I changed my number after the next text, which I didn't finish reading, but I know it was from August. I...I think I moved far enough away that I'm safe, now, but I can't be sure. I think every statue I see now is going to pop out and do something horrible to me. I wonder about going back, to warn the next batch of security guards who might be employed there, but there's no way. I can't risk it. If that makes me a coward, so be it. Maybe you could do it in my stead.

_Statement ends._


	15. New Babylon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of a pilgrim, regarding his amnesia and voyage through the desert. Original statement given November 2nd, 2016. 
> 
> Statement begins.

To this day, I am not sure whether what I experienced was past, present, future, or another world entirely. But I've heard that this is the place to come to, if one experiences...something strange.

Although by now, I understand that this is the world I belong to, I did not wake up that way. I have no memory of how old I am or who I was before waking up in the desert. When I opened my eyes and blinked out sand, I was completely lost. I was laying on my back on a sand dune in a vast desert as the sun rose over the horizon. My name was a mystery to me, and although I couldn't remember anything about myself, I knew this wasn't right. I hadn't gone to sleep in a desert, had I? This wasn't anything like the blurry memories of streets and cars and buildings I knew. After I properly absorbed that I was in a desert, I looked around myself, wondering why the sand was an odd grey color. As I looked down on the ground next to me, and I found that the only thing around me was an old notebook, weathered and worn with a pen stuck in the wiring.

I looked through that notebook and found that the pages inside were almost completely filled up with diary entries. It took me a while to figure out from the sparse self-references that it had belonged to someone called 'Gil'. The notes described some awful scenario that had happened to the world, some great scorching of the Earth, a terrible extinction event that had destroyed most of civilization. I kept my head in it, reading from it every few seconds while wandering around in circles, trying to look for some semblance of food, water, or shelter. By the time I reached the part about the diary's owner mentioning that he had ventured into the feared 'Desert of Ashes' in search of a grand city called 'New Babylon', I had accepted that Gil must be my name, and that my family and friends, whoever they were, must be as dead as Gil had written.

All I could really do was start walking, and seeking out this great city I had written of before the amnesia. I had a bit of a panic at first, because I'd been wandering aimlessly, long enough for whatever sparse winds there were to eliminate any footprints I had left. Which way was this city supposed to be? It was evening before I settled on a direction. I had stood atop a high ash dune. As the sun set, I thought I could see the tiniest, faintest of lines against the horizon. I didn't know if that was it, or if it was just some mirage, but I opted to head for it anyway.

The desert wasn't anything like what the word would have called to mind before. Besides the composition of the 'sand', it wasn't that bright. It was hot during the day, of course, sweltering, and bitterly cold at night, but I could see that a sky of some color or other had been hidden behind a translucent wall of shadow. Not quite cloud cover, but more like a layer or film, which I took to be more ash floating in the atmosphere and blocking the sun's light. There was also no sign of life whatsoever, besides me. Not at first. I mean, a normal desert environment, it's harsh, but things survive. Life finds a way, and there are whole ecosystems adapted to it, but out here, there was just...nothing. No cacti, no weeds, no ponds, no lizards or voles or snakes. There certainly weren't any other people out here. It was just nothing, as far as the eye could see.

There was never any change in the weather, much less a seasonal monsoon. The sun rose and set, as did the moon, and that was it. About three days in, when I couldn't see the faint line on the horizon getting any closer, I decided it might be wise to start keeping track of the days. In the margins of the scribbled-on pages, I began to write tally marks, keeping track of each sunset I saw. It was a good thing I started early, because I had no idea how long I was going to be out there for, and now that I'm here, I can tell you that it was a long, long, long time.

I never found food or water, and though my stomach ached with hunger constantly, and my mouth was always torturously dry, I never keeled over and perished. I would walk all day and be so tired and exhausted, but never would I collapse until I had made the conscious choice to sleep for the night, and I feel as though I could have gone without that, too, if I chose to. My clothes began to get predictable wears and tears, but never did they become rendered completely unwearable, not that they were exactly protecting me from anything. I continued to peruse the old notebook, which also never degraded beyond my ability to read it or write in it. The pen never ran out of ink. I could feel things deteriorating, but never dying.

The notebook seemed to take forever to explore, though it was never of much help. I found details inside of Gil's--er, my own--exploits; how he had hoped to find that the ash layer over the atmosphere was thinner somewhere so that he could see the stars again, and how he hoped to experience rain again one day, and how he wondered if the rumors of cats and dogs and birds being alive in New Babylon were true. The city I had written about seemed like not just a safe haven, but a rebirth. A collection of people were rumored to have created a vast city where things were thousands of times better than anywhere else on the remnants of the planet, an El Dorado-like place of things that were now luxuries, where life was normal and not a constant, unceasing, agonizing struggle at its best. They had food there in great supply, and their skins were clear and clean, and they even had trees. Trees! Can you imagine that? I couldn't. I could barely remember what a tree looked like after the first year, and couldn't remember what a tree even was after five. The notebook was the only description I had of things that were rapidly fading from memories to foreign concepts. But then, the notebook reminded me that such a fading had been happening for the entire decade after the catastrophe.

And no, you didn't mishear me. I said 'years'. I learned to write my tally marks small after a while. It isn't that the faint line in the distance that was framed against the setting sun never got any bigger, but it took an immense amount of time to do so. It was three years in before I saw the first...thing.

I won't call it a ghost, or a monster, but it wasn't a person either. It was...sort of like shadow. It was walking towards me in the distance one night, a definite human shape, but too dark and indistinct to make out. I called out to it, asking who it was, even running joyously towards it at first, thinking that I had finally found another human presence. I slowed down as I got closer and saw its shifting form, the scritch-scratch in the surface of its shape. I couldn't make out a face, even as close as I was, although I'm sure it had one. It was walking towards me with what I realized was a determined strut. There was no emotion in its walk, and I could tell that it was not coming towards me because it felt my same elation. That elation turned to hesitation, then trepidation, then fear, as I realized that what I'd stumbled on out here had ill intentions for me, and that I needed to get away. I ran in the opposite direction, and didn't stop running for several hours, even though the stitches in my sides felt like knives.

Some new form of life, I think. Or a manifestation of the desert. Or possibly both. I came to call them 'shadows' as I wrote my first serious entry in the diary, as opposed to odd little tick marks and tallies, although I still think that name is not doing them justice. I continued to run across them in the following years, always walking inexorably towards me, even from distances that I couldn't have been spotted from behind the dunes. I had the terrible feeling that something awful would happen to me if I let them make contact with me. Their appearances were rare...mostly.

Then there were the dust storms. Because yes, there were still dust storms. That was one feature that the Desert of Ash had in common with what a normal person would associate with the desert. They were these massive black clouds of ashes that were blowing on the wind, walls of suffocation drawing towards me, too fast and massive to outrun. I never tried, but I did take my tattered shirt off and wrap it around my mouth and nose when caught in them. They were awful--the stinging of small particles against my bare flesh, the complete dissolution of the sky, ground, and horizon. In a sharp contrast to the usual days, you couldn't see anything more than a few feet in front of you when caught in the dust storms. They were the only times I thought that I might actually die out there, choked on ash and eventually merged with the desert floor, sunken in and forgotten along with the rest of the old world. And I feel like the encounters with the shadows happened more often inside those storms. It was terrifying, being unable to see them until they were almost right on top of me. I would run through the blackness, tripping over myself and struggling to breathe, for hours before the conditions finally returned to normal.

Do you know how many years it took me, how many day-by-day tally marks I wrote down in the notebook, before I finally arrived at New Babylon, the only thing that kept me going in the midst of burgeoning nihilism and despair? Forty years. Forty years, exactly. Over the span of fourteen thousand, six hundred days with no food, water, or meaning to live, the faint line on the horizon transformed into a silhouette, and the silhouette into a skyline. I remember thinking every evening that, against the blazing glow of the setting sun, it looked as though the city was on fire.

And it was. When I finally arrived on the final day of the fortieth year, after one last dust storm, I could feel my growing horror. Something was wrong. It wasn't sunset yet, but I could see the city, the massive buildings that glittered in the sun...and they were wrong. The whole place was up in flames. New Babylon was burning down, the smoke feeding the black cloud blanketing the sky. I moved forward faster, began to sprint in a mad race to get to the city and save something, anything, before it was reduced to another forgotten calamity. I don't know if day or night passed, because everything looked the same in the brilliant orange glow and hazy surroundings. I felt tears streaming down my face and never stopping as I drew closer and closer, and entered the city limits.

Everything was burning. Trees, homes, skyscrapers, gardens, the very air. I had taken too long to get here. Or perhaps I had started my journey too late, held off too long on pursuing the rumors like the ones before me. Or maybe it had always been burning, maybe this bold new world that had always seemed too good to be true had always sat here, ending for all eternity, collapsing in on itself, and only now was I close enough to see it. There were no people here, no matter where I looked--just everything falling apart around me. Something terrible had happened here that I was too late to stop, and I ran through the streets, yelling with a voice so hoarse from neglect that I should've lost it a thousand times over, for someone, anyone, to show themselves.

They didn't. By the time I made it to the heart of New Babylon, it was gone. The fires had burned themselves out, leaving nothing but fields of ash and dark, empty husks where the mightiest buildings had stood. What had once been homes were gone, and what remained of them looked ready to collapse if I breathed too near. I was alone, and I had chased a futile dream, and now I had nothing. Everything was black and grey, including me. My clothes had singed and burned away to nothing at last. I was covered head to toe in so much ash that clung to me like a second skin that I now thought I surely resembled the shadows I had feared so much. Perhaps that was what those things had been, memories wrapped in ash until they were so alien to themselves that they didn't care to linger at their former homes. I would have let the shadows take me had any roamed the empty streets with me. But there was no one, no one but me.

I sat there on the ground, finally resting at the heart of New Babylon. There were no more tears left in me, and my cheeks had already dried. The air in my lungs still burned, and that was the only hint I had that I had witnessed this calamity, and that it hadn't happened ages ago, with how the streets were now as cold and dark and silent as though they'd been that way for eons. Perhaps it was forty minutes, or forty days, or indeed forty more years before I got back up. I looked down. The notebook was still in my hand.

It was totally black, and the pages were singed, and the wire holding it together had been warped by heat, but it was still mostly intact. Somehow, it had survived. It was the one thing here that was more than a memory, it was a record. It was a hollow victory to retain it, but I still had it. I think it was noticing the notebook again that drove me to go and find my final rest.

I calmly got up and strode along the street until I found a place that had once been a suburb, and found a house that was still standing. I carefully brushed aside the thing that had once been a door frame and surveyed the inside. There were stairs, and I made the decision to go up them, and down a creaking hall through whose burned-out walls I could see the rest of the city, and open the metal door to what looked to be a bedroom. The only thing there was a metal bedframe, the mattress and other dressings reduced to ash, but I was more than used to sleeping on that by now. I laid down on the bed, the notebook next to my head, and closed my eyes.

The next time I woke up, it was in my own bed. Here. Now. In this world.

Everything was back to normal, and I remembered that my name was Gilead Grimes, and that I lived in an affluent neighborhood with my parents and had a high-paying office job, and a car I treated as a daughter. The sky was back to its usual blue and half-covered in white clouds, and the television in the downstairs living room said that the weather forecast for this afternoon was rain. I remembered everything I'd been through since waking up in the desert, but the only proof I had was that the notebook was still laying next to my head, still caked in ash and bearing the beaten look it had attained over ages of use. I myself was totally clean and healthy, albeit with a wicked dryness in my throat.

I've submitted the notebook to you guys. Even if I wanted it, I no longer have a use for it. All it is is a testimony, a statement if you will. I just...it's been difficult to readjust. Everything I see, everything I do...it has the shadow of familiarity to it, but I've completely forgotten how to fit in with it. I sat there staring at the buttons and dials in my car when I first worked up the courage to get inside it. Getting back to normal hasn't just been difficult, I fear it might be impossible.

New Babylon haunts my waking thoughts, but never my nightmares. Not yet, at least. I wonder if I'll ever be able to forget this. Forgetting seemed so terrifying over the last four decades. Now it feels like something I could welcome.

_Statement ends._


	16. Seer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for mention of suicide and depiction of _ugly things_ happening to eyes.
> 
> Statement of Declan Lambert, regarding his disability. Original statement given April 13th, 2012.
> 
> Statement begins.

I've struggled with a gambling addiction most of my life. I won't weave you the grand sorry tale of how it spun out of control and destroyed me, because that's happened dozens of times over my life, and you'd think that by the age of twenty-seven, I'd have figured out by now that I needed to quit in order to get anywhere. But there came a time when I was down on my luck, and had just about lost everything. I had no family left to turn to, and no bridges left to burn, and all that was left to me was my car, which I was now living in as I drove across the continent to escape debt collecting thugs, and my gun, which I was too cowardly to use to rob a bank. I was somewhere in Central Europe when I finally came across some sort of fair or carnival, and decided I'd spend the very last of my money there and then shoot myself, comforted in the knowledge that I'd go out having fun.

I like county shows. Some people think they're low-brow or overpriced, but I don't care. They're fun as shit, nobody judges you for spending or eating, and you get to wander around and pick what you do with your time. Most fun you can possibly have outside a casino, sometimes more. And when I found a tent with a banner reading 'Madame Lucia Laghari's Fortunes' with an emblazoned eye, I didn't think I was getting anything more than your standard county show fun.

You can imagine what the inside of the big purple tent was like. Incense everywhere, couch cushions and stools everywhere, crystal balls on tables...and a ventilation tube running through the back so the place wasn't swelteringly hot the way it should've been. The madame herself walked out of the shadows all mystic-like and introduced herself, asking me to call her Madame Lucy if I wished. Bangles and rings everywhere, she couldn't take a step without walking into something, and I don't know how she saw where she was going with that thick veil hiding her eyes when the tent was already dimly lit. The shawl covering her from head-to-toe was a rich purple, and from what I could see of the skin on her hands underneath all the jewelry, and her face under the veil, she might've been a full-blood Indian, even if she was exaggerating her accent for the Englishman.

She beckoned me to the table, where she was in the business of palmistry, free of charge, or a tarot reading for five euros. I had five euros, so I said why the hell not. She laid her cards out on the table, shuffled them, lit a candle, and laid out her spread, and even though her face was half covered, I could see that the reading shocked her. Two pentacle suits, a five and a reversed four, accompanied by the Devil, Wheel of Fortune, both reversed, and the Tower. She took my hands and said, in a voice so full of pity that she dropped the fake accent, "Why do you do this to yourself, son? Your life is so bleak, and you know this more intimately than I ever could." I just chuckled uncomfortably, and told her that I was here for a good time, not a long time. "Aye, not a long time indeed," she told me, "if I See correctly. I know about the gun in your glove compartment, my son."

This made me run cold, as I'm sure you can understand. I looked down at her hands, which still held mine. Both of them bore a tattoo of an eye. I looked back up at her veiled face, and found her lip trembling. I weakly told her that I didn't know what she was talking about, and anyway, I didn't need her judgement, so now that I'd had my reading, I'd be going now. I sat back and made to get out of my chair, but she begged me to wait. She offered to do another reading, with the hope that perhaps she'd done the first one wrong, free of charge. I was wary and reluctant, but I eventually sat back down and allowed her to re-shuffle and re-lay the cards. She shuffled for a particularly long time on this, and eventually laid out five more cards: the Star, the Eight and Nine of Swords, the reversed Death, and the Queen of Cups.

She stayed quiet for quite a long while, and when she finally popped up, she said she believed this was a sign. I told her I thought this was a rather underwhelming revelation, but she shushed me and said that she meant a sign for the both of us, as opposed to just me. She tilted her head at me, then gathered up her cards, and asked me if I really wanted to die. If I really was depressed enough, self-hating enough, tortured enough, to find mercy in death. I stayed silent for a long while, wondering if I should just bolt from the tent. This woman was creepy, and she was making me think things I didn't want to think. The answer was no, it was just that I didn't see any other path out, and I wanted it on my own terms. I didn't say as much. In fact, I didn't say anything at all, but that didn't stop her from making her offer. Her offer, that was, to improve my life tenfold: a blessing of good fortune. I scoffed, but she told me not to snub my nose at her power. It was a deal she offered very rarely, she said, but it definitely would work. She could turn my awful luck into great luck, she promised...if I did something for her in return.

I told her bluntly that as she had laid out for me, I had all of nothing. No money, no job, no home...and no girlfriend, she finished for me. I squinted on her, asking if I was being propositioned. She laughed and told me that she was a little too old for me, but that if I was interested, she did have a daughter in need of a better life. I kept squinting, but I eventually laughed. She was really going for the whole 'marry my daughter' angle? I reminded her that the way that goes is, she's supposed to try and toss her daughter at some guy who's rich and successful, not some guy living out of his car. She told me that, if I took the deal, I would be rich and successful. I didn't have to, of course. Her daughter wasn't going to turn out to be ugly, she promised. She could introduce us, and if I was politely disinterested, I could still say no. I was still pretty suspicious, but then again, on the off chance this wasn't some stupid scam, I was getting a girlfriend and wealth out of it. I said, why the hell not.

So she took me to the center of the tent, and lifted her veil, and I saw the remainder of her face: wrinkles here and there, a little too heavy on the purple and gold eyeshadow, hair curled in ringlets, and very large, bright green eyes. Those eyes were so oddly coloured that I wondered if she was of mixed descent, wearing contacts, or both. She looked into mine with them, and took both of my hands, and gave me the 'official' deal:

"If, one year from now, you marry my daughter, Madame Lucia will bless you with good favor in all your endeavors and protect you from harm. If you do not marry, my favor will vanish and leave you with all that you gained and no more. If, though, you marry my little girl, and are cruel to her, or unfaithful to her, Madame Lucia will know, and the punishment will be most swift and wicked..."

I laughed again and send I'd never risk the wrath of the mother-in-law, and she smiled back. She said to wait in my car for the night once I was done with the carnival, and she'd send her daughter to see me in the morning. So I thanked her for her readings and left the tent.

The rest of my afternoon and evening were fun enough, though naturally my head was a bit too full to enjoy it. I went back to my car when I was feeling tired, and when I closed myself in, I looked mournfully at my glove compartment where I kept my gun. Then I looked back towards the county show, in the direction of Madame Lucia's tent. I felt like she was watching me right then, to see what I did. I wasn't going to kill myself just now. Maybe I was chickening out of it for good this time. But I did wonder if this girl was really going to show up in the morning, and how I'd have to explain to her that I had it, or that if debt collectors found her with me, she might _want_ me to have it.

So I went to sleep, I woke up the next morning to a tapping on my window. I blinked myself awake, looked at my watch, and then looked up, and it was a girl. I yanked myself up, still groggy, and rolled down my window. She asked if I was okay and if she should come back another time, but I waved her off and asked her who she was. Her name was Naya, she told me, and she was sent to check on my by her mother, Madame Lucia. I went a little red and apologized for my appearance, but she smiled and told me she often looked the same way when freshly woken. I didn't say it, but I kind of doubted that. She was beautiful, definitely related to Lucia judging by her face, but her large eyes were brown, her hair was straightened and hung down her back, and her smile was stunning. I asked for a minute to comb my hair and rub the sleep out of my eyes, and she gave it to me before I got out of the car and asked what she wanted with me.

Naya told me that "Mama's been bugging me to get married, and she says she found a handsome man who is interested." with only the barest trace of an accent. I remember feeling heat in my cheeks and asking if I fit the bill, and she laughed and told me that with a little work, I'd do fine. Fair enough, I said, and I gave her my name and age, and it occurred to me to ask her for ID, not because I thought she was any kind of villainous, but I'd heard stories of foreign girls getting married off, and it didn't pass me by that some parents did that to their kids at ages as low as sixteen or under. She handed it over, proving she was twenty-two, and I breathed a sigh of relief and apologized. She took it in stride, and I told her that hey, if she'd have me, was there any place she'd like to go today?

So we went out. We explored the countryside and found our way to the nearest city, since I was a stranger to this land and she traveled too much with her mom and the county show to know much more than I did. We found a really cheap pub where we could get drinks that tasted okay for cheap and have a breakfast-for-lunch kind of thing going on, and then we found this tiny little bowling alley. I had just enough money to buy us a couple of rounds before I was completely broke. We played against each other, and I remember that I kind of sucked at bowling, but this was the best I'd ever bowled. It was like I could visualize the perfect angle to throw the ball at. She beat me by just one point--she was getting a strike or spare nearly every turn, and she punched the air when she scored the victory.

I'll be honest, even right then, I could easily see myself getting married to this girl. She was easy to talk to, and very fun to be around, not to mention gorgeous. We had a day of fun, and when I offered to take her back, she directed me to take her to the countryside--she said she'd be happy to meet from hotels later, but for now she needed to get back to her mother. So I started driving out, when this car came up behind us on a back road. It's getting late, we're just out of the urban limits, and no one is around to see us, and then I hear gunshots, and I know exactly what's going on. Terror's got my hands white around the steering wheel, and I have no idea how to explain to Naya that she has the sorriest luck in the world to be stuck with me right now. She's freaking out at first, but then asks if I have a weapon, and I tell her yes, but I clam up when she asks where. She found it pretty quickly, though. And I'll be damned if this girl didn't start barking orders. She tells me to take the next few turns back into the city limits, as fast as I can, and start driving down back alleys. I'm panicking, sweating, but I didn't know what to do, so I just did what she said, fish-tailing my car trying to avoid bullets, with one having barely missed my ear and flown out of my front windshield. She just gives me instructions and I follow them, and I hear the chamber of a gun being prepped and the safety clicked off. I drove down a dimly-lit alley with them gaining on us, and when she told me, I took a harsh, swerving, and sudden right. I saw her aiming out of the window, and I smashed the gas pedal, getting out of the way just in time for the collectors' van to smash into the wall.

It was ugly. Naya asked me to slow down and stop. I was shaking, and terrified, but eventually we realized that no one's getting out of the crashed car, and there are no police coming to investigate. We hesitantly exited the car and went over to check on the van. It was totaled, crunched against the wall, which had cracked and crumbled, and there were two men inside, both bloodied and dead. I apologized to Naya and told her that if she stayed with me, she might be in danger, coming clean about my gambling debts that I hadn't paid and that this was why I was being targeted. She stayed silent for a while, before giving me back my gun and saying that, since we've already gone this far, we may as well try and improve our situation. I asked her what she meant, and she told me to check the van for both weapons and money. The windows were shattered, so we could easily reach the car insides, but getting the crumpled doors to open, or getting the key out to open the trunk with, was a pain. We found four handguns, two machine pistols, and a shotgun, scaring me worse than ever, but we also found cash. A _lot_ of cash. Undoubtedly, they'd sent men who were in the business of collecting on debtors, and Naya reasoned that predatory gambling was only a shade off from predatory lending. She told me to take both the cash and the weapons. I apologized to her for nearly getting her killed, and furthermore for ruining what had been a frankly amazing day. I told her to go back to the county show and try to convince them to pack up and move on, but she refused.

She wanted to stay with me. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why. But she told me that she wouldn't sit by while a broken-down man was being hunted by criminals. I told her it was out of the question, as I was leaving the country soon...but as there's still a wedding band on my finger, you can guess how well that went over with her.

It was like something out of a movie. We traveled across Europe, just trying to live day-to-day life, becoming friends under fear while we ducked, dodged, and eventually lost the debt collectors who gave up at some point, since they all seemed to die in odd coincidences when they came for us. We kept moving anyway, trying to stay on top of things and have a little fun now and then. With how tense everything was, it was a while before the real fun came along.

No matter what I did, it always seemed to go my way. There would always be a big sale on the days I shopped, my fast food orders always came cooked to perfection, the songs I liked were always playing on the radio. and I always managed to get the very last of the best that I wanted. My relationship with Naya, well, the cracks were buffed out at an amazing speed, and we...well, we made it a thing only three months in. The sex was amazing, the romance was better. I fell in love with her very, very quickly and very, very hard. The flame never seemed to die. There was no denying I was a very, very lucky man. But I didn't realize just how lucky I was until I was finally secure enough to fall back onto my vices. I know, like I said, you'd think I'd learn. We were in Spain when I finally felt the temptation I'd been fighting drag me back in.

And I never lost. No matter what it was--slots, poker, blackjack--I always had the perfect play and came out on top. It was like I had a sixth sense telling me exactly what was the right time to press the button, what the other players were likeliest to play, and what would get me to the win no matter what. It took me a while to realize that this was an actual thing I was doing. I gambled a lot, and I brought home a lot of money each time. I eventually learned that because I was just 'so good', I tended to get accused of cheating the system, so I ducked out of any one place before that could get me in the same sort of trouble that had plagued me before. Always, I was headed back towards my home of England, slowly but surely.

Over a period of years, I got richer and richer, holding a fairly boring restaurant job here and there while I let gambling bring me in the real money. My life was amazing, and just shy of a year, I had enough money to buy my Naya a ring and I was more than ready to. She cried when I proposed and it was an instant yes. And we were a thing for ten years.

I am many things, and many of them are not good, but you've already heard about the gambling. I suppose that, with me being so happy and on top of the world, it was only a matter of time before another flaw came in to tear me down.

It started with vanity, I suppose. Once I had money, I had presence, and I didn't have to fear people's eyes on me like I used to. In fact, I welcomed it. People always looked my way when I walked into a room. With men, it was envy. With women, it was desire. I got off on that a lot. As my relationship with Naya soared, leveled out, and drifted, and I started to forget what consequences were... I loved Naya, I did. She was the greatest woman I'd ever had in my life. My morals were starting to degrade, and I can at least say that whatever the things I did, I did all of them before thinking of turning my back on her.

It was ten years. Love carried us that long. A wonderful ten years, more than enough time for me to forget that I'd ever once lived a downtrodden life, long enough for me to forget the exact details of the deal I'd made with some fortune teller in Austria or that I'd even made one to begin with. I should have kept my promise.

No more talking in circles. I cheated. It was a horrible thing to do, and trust me, I regret it more than you think. Madame Lucia made sure of that.

I've never considered myself much of a womanizer, but as Naya and I shared a growing wealth, we shared less and less time together as we pursued our own interests, and that left my arm unoccupied for many evenings, especially in the seedier sorts of environments where I did my gambling. I think that fed into some insecurities that would eventually show themselves at home. Was it me, or was Naya not paying the same attention to me as she was before? Or was it that she still looked at me, but her gaze held a little less happiness than it once had? Was I not showering her with enough gifts? Was I not performing well enough in the sack? Why did she look out the window so much when we were driving? Why did she always seem more content to be on the phone with her 'gals' than talk to me?

I hungered for her to look at me...and I think she was, but not when I looked back. I could feel her gaze on my back, when I turned away, appraising me, seeing all my shortcomings. We'd lived together a long time. She knew me in and out, and she loved me regardless...right?

I didn't like it. The feeling of her eyes on me in the worst way, conflicting so much with that lush, addictive rush of eyes on me in the nightclubs and casinos...I hated it. And when I found a woman in a glittering violet slip and gold eyeshadow one evening, with those big beautiful eyes, and she looked at me with the same adoration that I had once found in my wife...it made it easier than I thought it should be. It wasn't like anyone was going to know. Naya would never find out, and besides, this was just what I needed, what I deserved. I took her to a hotel room, and we got our clothes off, and I slept with her...and just after I finished, I caught my breath, and looked down into her eyes...

They were big and green, and they seemed to swallow me up and burn right through me in the same moment. They knew. They knew, and they were judging me, and they were delivering on their wicked promise.

I screamed a lot. You would too, if you were having your eyes burned out. I wasn't the only one, and I guessed that my date for the evening was gazing horrified at whatever my face must've looked like, cowering in the corner, until finally she bolted and the sound of the door slamming reached my ears.

It was horrifically painful, but eventually I blindly searched until I found my phone and used voice dial to beg help from 999. And when they picked up, I started babbling to them that I needed an ambulence, something awful had happened, and here was my address. But they didn't let me finish. The operator who had answered, her voice was so cold when she spoke over me. She told me that she wasn't sending me help, that she knew what I had done, that she knew I'd broken my promise, and that I deserved what I'd gotten. Then she hung up.

At some point room service found me and I was delivered to a hospital. But she had one last torture in store for me. She came to visit me at the hospital. Whether it was Naya or Madame Lucia, I couldn't be sure anymore. I'm not sure if they were even different people now. But she stood by my bedside, and told me in that awful, accusing voice of hers what a traitor I was, what a sellout, what a waste of air. She listed off every single invisible grievance she'd had with me throughout our marriage, damning me for never picking up on them, and saying that of course, she'd always known it would end this way, and that she was leaving me.

It will not be a shock to hear that I no longer have a problem gambling. Or womanizing, for that matter.

_Statement ends._


	17. Caged

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Dallas Larson, regarding his boxing coach. Original statement given March 3rd, 2018.
> 
> Statement begins.

I have always loved underground boxing.

The televised version isn't the same. I mean, if you want to see it the real way, up close and personal, you have to shell out a good chunk of money, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred euros depending on the venue, double that if you're trying to snag a ringside seat. Not to mention all the hype can be a turnoff for me. Names and faces, bets on who wins what way, commentators talking this way and that. Never minding the more muted version you get unofficially, I've always been more attracted to the type of thing you find at seedy places, and sometimes _literally_ underground, in alleyways and old disused railway offices. Nothing feels too fixed, and it's much easier to get to--much easier to hear those harsh smacks, thuds, and crunches. All it is is two guys working out a shit ton of aggression the best way they know how. Loser gets his face swollen, winner gets some good cash. No measurements, no comparisons, no bullshit.

Of course, the UK being as small as it is, it doesn't have the best selection of these. More than you think, definitely, but I've wrestled with the idea of saving up to get to something in Ireland, or god forbid, venture out east or to the Americas. Thankfully, I never needed to. Last summer, I found him. The _one_. The guy who _owned_ the ring, owned bare-knuckle boxing and made it his bitch.

His name was Duncan, and as I understand it, he was visiting abroad from Detroit. Tall, dark hair and eyes, square jaw, a small black hoop hanging from one ear...and a couple tattoos. One along his right forearm of a sheathed dagger, and one along his lower back, of some Hebrew word or phrase. And he always walked around with these headphones in his ears playing music, which he'd only take out and pass off to his coach when it came time to start the match. Watching him in the ring...it was an experience. He wasn't a dirty fighter, but he was brutal. No one who went in the ring with him lasted more than two minutes. He was fast, and he hit like a tank. More blood and teeth flew during his fights than a dozen other fights combined. It was...visceral. The way his body moved, the way his jaw locked and his arms flexed, the stare in his eyes...he fought like a man possessed. Everyone could see it. Everyone could feel it, too. When he stepped into the ring, everything took on an extra layer of reality. The lights seemed brighter, the smells seemed stronger, the sounds got louder. He quickly became my favorite boxer, not just in the venue, but in my career as a boxing fan. I'm not gonna lie, I had a huge crush on him, too. He carried that bloody strength and ferocity with him constantly, I think, but on a dormant level outside the ring. It meshed really well with the booming laugh and friendly smile he took on as soon as he stepped outside the cage.

My few boxing friends didn't share that opinion, saying they thought he was creepy. Apparently, the venues didn't like him either, because eventually, no one would showcase him. His fights were always so vicious and one-sided that no one wanted to fight him, and it got boring to always know who would win, so they'd cut him loose. That didn't sit right with me. Yeah, fighters sent in against him universally had to have surgery, but he always sent his winnings towards their hospital funds. After a while, I couldn't find him anymore at any of the haunts I knew hosted the underground tournaments. That left me really dissatisfied. Once he'd left, the other fights weren't the same. They still felt real, but they felt too tame, none of them had that same energy. For a while I wondered if he'd gone back to America, but I started to hear whispers. I listened to them, and eventually followed them to the place he'd retreated to.

I understood it to be new, and hastily-constructed, out in the Edinburgh Vaults. Not the small sections of it allowed for use in ghost tours--the real deal. How they did it, I don't know, much less how they kept it secret from the police. But through a secret entrance--not telling where--you could get down into a long tunnel that had been lit by floor torches, and if you followed it to its end, you'd come to a decent-sized room in which they'd set up a cage. This was where I found Duncan doing his _real_ boxing.

And when I say 'real', I _mean_ real. That energy, that manic power and ferocity that Duncan carried with him...it was everywhere here. Every fighter had it, was soaked in it. The crowd was much smaller, but that was a blessing, because you didn't have to struggle to see the matches. He fought a lot more often here, more than anyone else, and a great deal of the fighters came with the explicit intent of going up against him. Broken limbs, jaws, and eye sockets weren't just typical here, they were expected. There were no rules at all, and the fighters loved it as much as the spectators. Here, you were fighting to _hurt_ others--and to get hurt in return. The thing is...I mean, it seems stupid, but occasionally, you'd get the idea that one of them wasn't human. Some of them had the wrong proportions, and some of them just seemed off. There was this Jared guy who came in, he was massive, a good two heads taller than Duncan, and solidly built, and he crunched _beautifully_ when fists met his body, and he gave as good as he got. Another one whose name I didn't get had these yellow eyes and just seemed...too sharp, too jagged, and he kept sniffing the air. He and Duncan fought for twenty minutes before they ended up making out against the wall of the cage, still trying to beat each other senseless.

I think by the time I started showing up to these events in the Vaults, the fighters, and Duncan in particular, knew it was the _real_ fans who'd come to see him. He'd do the wrestling arena thing where he'd take his shirt off just before getting into the cage and toss it into the crowd. There was usually already blood on it by the time he did this. And when he finished his last fight for the night, he'd be so streaked with his opponents' blood that the cluster of fans crowding around him as he left would leave hand prints all over him. One day, I was lucky enough to catch the shirt thrown my way, and you'd better believe I treated that thing like a signed autograph. Clutched it tight to me the entire time he fought. When the matches were over, and I left, I threw it in the front seat of my car like it was its own person while I drove home. And it took me until I was home to actually take notice of it. I mean, I was just carrying it in, wondering whether to wash it, when I noticed how off it was. The scent of blood on it was still fresh, and when I pressed my fingers to it, I felt a faint wetness, even though it should've been dry for hours by now. I washed it and dried it, and even though the wetness faded, the actual bloodstains never cleaned out of it, nor did the scent leave.

It's silly, probably, that as many times as I'd watched him, and with all of the weird things I'd seen in the Vaults' cage, it was a raggedy shirt to really make me consider that Duncan himself also might not be human. Took me way less time, a matter of seconds really, to decide that I didn't give a damn. I wore that shirt next time I attended a fight, hoping like some stupid teenage girl that he'd notice. And he did, and he smiled my way, and my heart beat faster, even though it was already pounding the way it always did when I came down to this place.

I remember that I must've looked like a deer caught in headlights when I finally met him outside of the arena. It was bizarre, just seeing him strolling down the sidewalk, hands in pockets, jamming to some music in his AirPods. I was sure it was him, though, there was no mistaking that dagger tattoo. I just sort of froze while he was walking past, and then the part of my brain where the idiot teenager still lives went haring after him and got his attention. At the moment, it was surreal, and looking back on it, more than a little embarrassing. I wondered how he did it--just living everyday life, when I could still see all of that violence behind his cheerful smile. I asked him how he was doing, and if he was going to be fighting in the ring tonight, because it just wasn't worth coming if he wasn't there. He said that he was, and said that he'd seen me in the crowd several times, and that if I liked it that much, he'd make sure to break some dude's jaw extra hard tonight, just for me. His speaking voice was so much quieter than I remembered; in the cage and getting ready for a match, he had a roar of a voice that would've suited an army corporal. He asked me my name before he left, and my heart fluttered when I answered.

That night, he didn't just break the guy's jaw. He grabbed him by the hair and slammed his face down on his knee so hard that his teeth made their way up into his eye sockets. I think I cried, it was so damn cool. He rolled his shoulder and said 'next', and they came and went, and before I knew it, he was leaving the ring. He never did disappoint, and I was all ready to go back home and replay the whole thing in my head like I always did, but when I was filing out through the tunnels, I heard my name called. I turned, and he was staring at me, and beckoning me to come closer. People turned to look at me as I pointed to myself, asking if he meant me, and staring even more when he nodded and I walked over. He was sitting to the side in the hall, and the queue slowed down to watch him, but the ringmaster barked at everyone to get going. I remember stuffing my hands in my pocket to circumvent any unintended tenting. He was still shirtless and covered in blood and sweat, and bruises were forming along his shoulders. He was the most beautiful thing on the planet, and he asked me how I was doing and if I'd liked the matches tonight.

We were talking. We were really sitting there, talking, like acquaintances. He seemed so genuinely interested in how well he'd fought from my perspective and what little blow-by-blows I could remember, and I thought several times that he could rip me apart, or break my limbs, and no one here would be able to stop him. Just faint little flashes in my brain reminding me that I was having a conversation with a dangerous sort of person. I wasn't stupid enough to blow them off, with all I'd seen him do, but somehow that only made it more exciting.

And before I knew to stop myself, I blurted out, asking if he'd teach me to box.

It was the stupidest thing I'd ever said in my life. I sat there frozen while he peered at me. His face seemed to have changed in the minutes since I'd first started speaking to him--he had this expression on, with his eyes just slightly more lidded than before, making him look just a little half-drunk, but his eyes were still full of violence and still burning holes in me. He stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, and the funniest thought occurred to me--I wondered if he was tasting blood in the air. After a few seconds that seemed like forever, he said "Yeah, sure. I'll teach you how to box. Meet me here tonight at eleven o'clock." He didn't seem to hear my protests that I had misspoke and didn't want to learn as he walked away.

I want to stress that just because I am a huge fan of boxing does not mean I know how to box or would be any good at it. I mean, I'm not a small dude, but I don't practice any martial arts and I've gotten into almost no fights in my entire life. I didn't know the first thing about fighting, and I would've been at a huge disadvantage against a regular boxer, nevermind one that fought like Duncan did. I stood there for several minutes, trying to process my colossal mistake. Then I just...left. Eleven p.m. was only a couple of hours away, so I went to hang out at a bar for a last drink instead of going home. I had two choices: go home and stay there and just pretend like I'd forgotten, or got lost, or died...or meet up with Duncan and get my arse kicked, possibly fatally, and preferably so considering the alternative was being hideously pulped _and_ humiliated while Duncan thought I was some poseur who had just wanted to look tough and impress a big-shot boxer.

But I went. I should mention, the Edinsburgh Vaults are scary on any day, especially at night, but they're far less so when you're surrounded by crowds of people and can hear the whoops and yells of a bloodthirsty crowd. Going back to the ring after hours was, you know, mildly terrifying. Kept wondering if the ghosts of those serial killers were going to get me. But I found him there, waiting for me at the fully-lit cage, music playing from his phone on a bench outside the ring, and he beckoned me in. He put his hands on my shoulders, telling me he could sense I was nervous, and to try to let go of it, and he invited me to throw the first punch.

I did. I hit his face. It didn't give, but I did feel something crack in my hand. His mouth twitched into a grin under my knuckles. Then he raised his fist, and I experienced a critical, piercing moment of terror in the instant just before his fist caught me in the face. He must have held back a lot, because I went flying, and something definitely broke, but I was only dizzied and not unconscious. And more than that...I felt _awake_. If I can reiterate, I've never gotten into fights before, ever. Getting socked this way hurt worse than almost anything I'd ever experienced, and made me afraid of being hit again, but it also...felt good. No, that's not the right way of saying it. It made me feel more alive. Electrified. It was like I'd been shaken to such a degree that I could feel the world more clearly. All of a sudden I wanted to stagger to my feet and hit back. I felt that sensation that always saturated the air whenever Duncan was fighting a match and I was watching. I knew that if I hit hard enough, I could produce those crunches and cracks. I got up, and this time I swung, and socked him in the face, and this time his head swung with the blow.

We descended into a no-holds-barred brawl very quickly, and while I know he was still holding back a lot, it made me feel good to not be so helpless as I had thought. When we finally ended it, caught our breaths, and stood up, Duncan said he'd be happy to continue teaching me. I told him I wanted to be like him--a fierce warrior, this form of violence in a class of its own. Not using the same language, of course, but that's what he was and that's what I wanted to be. And he told me I could be. Told me he'd seen it in my eyes--the primordial terror, the savagery of men fighting for its own sake and ripping and tearing and beating and bruising to survive and to kill. He was speaking very oddly, but I was following along as though every word of his made total sense, because it did.

Duncan told me, that night, that being in the cage and boxing was a liminal, pure form of violence. Once you entered the cage with your opponent and it was shut behind you, he said, nothing mattered anymore. There were no names, no problems, no barriers. There was no right or wrong, no innocent or guilty, and that was the way he preferred it. It was like he was speaking poetry to me. I could see what he was saying as though I had lived the same life he had. And for a few moments, the soreness in my body felt like a dozen different things. In a haze, I felt as though I'd been sent sprawling from a bomb blast, had a wall collapse on me, been run over by a car, and been drunkenly beaten half to death in a bar brawl. It all hurt, but it all felt good, because it supplied me with that wonderful adrenaline that I knew could empower me to fight the way I had tonight, maybe fight like Duncan had one day.

He was only able to teach me for two weeks. After that, he'd said, he had to go back to America with his boyfriend. So I paid as much attention as I could, and absorbed as much knowledge of how to fight as I could in the time I had. The bruises he left on my body could have easily been from getting hit by bricks, but the soreness they left me with was more like the afterglow of sex. I still watched his each and every show, and drank it in when he tore apart the human and inhuman monsters that entered the arena with his bare hands, always leaving them just alive enough to recover and occasionally laughing it off when his coach told him he might need to take a break to recover. The flying teeth and wads of blood spat out of mouths affected me differently, now that I'd become his pupil. Any flecks of blood that hit me when the punches landed felt like anointment.

He left me a set of Airpods before he went home, told me to train with the songs on them. I never box without them. I box in the Vaults' cage, now, and I'm saving up my prize money. Don't know what for, yet. I'm not so starstruck I'd follow him to Detroit, but maybe I'll buy my own boxing ring. Start organizing my own matches and tournaments. I definitely understand, now. It would be so easy to let this savagery loose, turn it on the populace, but it doesn't suit me. He's right--there's something special about the boxing ring, besides the fact that it lets you pour all this violence out of you safely. It's almost sacred to me. Expressing my desire for violence any other way would be...coarse. Off-color. Tasteless, improper, wrong.

But this? This is just right. This is what I was made for.

_Statement ends._


	18. Ghost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Sarah McPherson, regarding her husband's disappearance. Original statement given February 29th, 2012.
> 
> Statement begins.

I understand you people look into things like this. Please, I need your help. The police won't answer my calls anymore, and my family have threatened to have me committed.

It's my husband, his name is Mario Rossi. He's been missing for six months now, and nobody will help me look for him, or even acknowledge that he exists! We'll have been married for four years now, soon. He's a lovely person, very sweet, no enemies, and I don't know why anyone would want to hurt him, but he's gone, and he just--it's insane! The way everyone else has just forgotten him!

This started August 20th, 2011, I remember the day very clearly. He hadn't come home from work that evening, and I remember being worried, but not hysterical. He liked to stay out with his guy friends on occasion, go drinking if he'd had a bad day. He'd be home before midnight, and I'd comfort him and keep his spot in the bed ready. It was one thing for him to come home late, but rather unusual for him to not be there by morning. So, the next morning while I was making my coffee, I called him. I still had one of those old flip phones, and I entered the number I knew was correct...and it didn't pick up. I got the voice message telling me that this number was not in use. I know that number by heart, and I re-dialed and everything, even with the area code in place. The same message came back every time, and this is when I knew something was really wrong.

I spent the whole day calling the police station and putting up fliers. I wondered immediately whether he'd run away for some reason, or been kidnapped. I know him, I do! And I know he'd never run around behind my back, so there had to be a good reason he'd canceled his number. But the people...the people I'd talked to, all day, searching for him, desperately trying to find out where he might've gone and why...they all claimed not to know him.

I reacted the way you'd expect me too, of course. Shock and anger, accusing them of playing some sick prank on me, even wondering if I was the victim of some stupid stunt for reality television. I got into several fights, the biggest being when my mother, of all people, adamantly pretended not to know who Mario was or that I'd ever been married. I know that isn't true, because I remember her being at the wedding! She put up a whole fuss about my choice of dress and everything!

And it just didn't stop. The next day, I got a visit from the police, as well as my friends and family. The officers gave me a stern talking-to about making up stories about missing people, and I almost broke down crying right then and there. I might've attacked them, if my friends and family hadn't driven up then and there. They made my apologies, and that was when I realized this was no hoax. They were all coming over to check on me, make sure I was okay, wanting to know if something traumatic had happened to me recently--something to make me create fantasies of a husband I'd never had.

Nobody remembered him but me. I shoved my ring in their faces, that day, asking them what a wedding band was doing on my finger if I'd never been married, and they had no answer. But none of them believed me, or bothered to listen to me, and none of them has since. It's been like that for months, now. I still live in my home, with my too-large bed and the empty space next to me every night. I've stopped trying with them. They won't help me, no one will. But--but you people, you can, right?

I know he existed! I know he did! Something's wiped him away, taken the memories out of my loved ones' heads, and for some reason I'm the only one unaffected, and I don't know why. I don't know why this has happened to me, and all I want is to know that Mario is safe, or even alive, and it eats at me every day that I have nothing to go on. I cling to this wedding band, now. It's all I've got left of him, this single, irrefutable proof that he was definitely with me. We never took a lot of pictures, and a lot of his belongings have vanished with him. But I have this.

I remember thinking it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever given me, this. You see the winding circuits, the ligatures? He told me that it reminded him of the way out hands locked together after our first date, when he was walking me home. I love him so much, and I always knew he was the one for me. And I can still hear the words he'd say to me each morning and night in my head. I can still remember how he felt next to me, around me. I can still hear his jovial laugh. And I don't have him anymore. I don't really have anyone anymore, because everyone that I could turn to thinks I'm crazy. I don't talk to anyone anymore from my immediate family or former social circle. They all want me to drop it, and act like a 'normal' person, and if I don't, they start bringing up mental hospitals. They've just accepted that! They've just forgotten a wonderful man who was dear to all of them, not just me, and now they want me to go 'get better' and forget him, too!

I...I'm sorry, I don't mean to cry. I don't get this way talking about him, anymore. Not everyday. Mostly I just feel hollow, dead inside. I just shut down emotionally to keep from making things worse, even though I don't really know why I bother anymore. They all hate me, and Mario, he...he's probably not...

...It's hell. Trying to live, and work, without him, with the way the others are. No one will even pretend to care anymore. I've gotten dangerously close to just not bothering to eat anymore, a few times. There've been plenty of days where I couldn't get out of bed. It's omnipresent, you know? I know I could be happier if I let him go, but I refuse to. He was here. He was real. He was my Mario, and he deserves to be remembered. I swore to love him until death parted us. Well, he's alive, if not out there somewhere in hiding, then in my heart. I just wish...I just wish I knew what had happened here. I had too many years with that man to just act as though they didn't happen. Something is wrong here, seriously wrong, and I think you're the only ones who might know how to fix it.

And...and part of me is afraid. I know I'm not crazy. I'm the only sane one here. But just being in that position, being the only one who didn't forget...are they going to come for me, next? And if they do, will I be reunited with him? What if all of this is a sort of months-long waking dream? I've never been in any accidents. But I think being comatose in a hospital would be worth slowly living to death like this.

We were going to have kids. We were going to have a family. We were going to be the happiest little couple in our county, and to have him taken away from me, vanish without a trace, like he was never even there, and on top of that, to have other people tell me he really wasn't...you can understand why that would drive anyone to drink.

Our anniversary's coming up. I have to go get him flowers. But you people, your Institute...I don't know if you can bring him back. But if you could give me even a hint, some sort of information snippet. Anything at all that points to Mario, or even just some sort of determination of what happened here. Anything, please. Please...

_Statement ends._


	19. Drift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Lorenzo Lauranitas, apparent crewmate of a ghost ship. Statement found inside a bottle containing cell phone data, recovered on reconnaissance mission by Gertrude Robinson in 2010.
> 
> Statement begins.

To whoever should find this,

Please help me. I am weary and afraid and lost.

The crew of the _Tundra_ knew me as Lawrence, but my real name is Lorenzo Lauranitas. I was a new member loading cargo for the ship, which is under the Solus Shipping PLC.

I was simply taking a nap on the ship when I woke up and found that all other members of the crew had vanished. I had just enough time to register that lifeboats had been taken when I heard the whistle. Fog started to roll in, until I couldn't see anything. Being quite superstitious, I was very scared as I imagined the ship to be haunted.

I was forced to eat through the rations while the boat simply wandered aimlessly, with nothing I did able to change its course. The fog was too thick to see anything, even if I craned my neck skyward. Eventually, the boat slowed to a stop, and the fog cleared somewhat, and I found that it had stopped just shy of an island shoreline. I disembarked immediately, thinking to find help, only for the ship to retreat back into the sea once I had left. I was now stranded, and as I quickly found out, the island was just as abandoned as the _Tundra_ now was. I can give no coordinates, as I have no idea how long the ship was traveling with only me on it, or in what direction, but we were somewhere in the north Atlantic around Scandinavia at last check.

I have remained here for what I am sure must be several years now. The days and nights pass without any given day being different from the last. The weather is always overcast, occasionally raining but never storming nor does sunlight ever break through the clouds. Signs of habitation are rare, and full of empty promises. A helmet here, a bottle there. No skulls or bodies, nothing to cement my dread that this will be the place I die, yet I am by now sure that I will never leave. I once found a wallet, and was ecstatic, only to find that the driver's license inside had been smudged clean of all information and the photograph scratched out.

Whatever keeps me here keeps me fed, yet does not allow me to wander. I am permitted to explore the beaches and some bits of the jungle inward, enough to find coconuts and berries and other sources of food. I am a vegetarian by lack of choice now, as I've not had the fortune to find any crabs or snails washed ashore, perhaps because other signs of sentient life would give me too much hope. I've not been lucky enough to poison myself via berry or mushroom yet.

I cannot venture too far into the jungle towards the island center, as if I do, the fog begins to take hold again, until I cannot see the way forward. I have attempted this a few times with the same results. Only one time have I ever pressed the forest and gone further than this, and when I did so, I heard the growling and snarling of distant, lurking beasts drawing closer. I retreated and have not tried again. The same holds true if I attempt to swim out to sea, and take my chances on the waves. The fog rolls in, and if this alone does not deter me, I begin to feel cold and slimy limbs sliding against my legs, whether weeds or tentacles or ghostly hands I cannot say, and am unwilling to find out for sure.

These mists do not leave me be solely to roam my small portion of the island allotted to me. The fog fills my brain when I sleep, offering me neither a dream nor a nightmare, but some haze inbetween. I feel myself adrift, not quite drowning, on the worst nights, my unconscious mind losing grip of the ground underneath me.

I should have eaten the forest clean several times by now, yet never do I run out of food. There is a brook feeding into the ocean that contains water that is clean, insofar as I can tell, as I have not found myself going any madder after drinking it. If you see this, then I am still here, awaiting assistance, unless I have finally given in and stopped eating, an option which looks more appealing with each passing day.

I miss the company of others, craving what I miss more and more in a way that gnaws at me. And as time continues, I wonder if I am delusional to think other people even existed, if I have not perhaps been alone my entire life. And I am truly alone. The sun and moon turn away from me, all life ignores me, and even God does not answer me out here. I cannot be content with the fact that I will live out some normal number of years here if I only do so quietly. I am stranded, and my mind slips further adrift as my isolation continues. The quiet sorrow of my dreams worsens to dread, as the hisses and snarls of the hidden beasts have found me when I rest, as have the clinging tendrils and hands, though I now understand better, recognizing neither as true forms of life, but rather this space itself expressing its desire to feel my terror as I fade. The fog has even begun to invade my waking hours. It feels like I have less space to travel before the mists roll in to rebuff me again. I have on occasion witnessed stretches of my formerly-safe beach overcome with that grayish-white nothingness, unless I have simply hallucinated it. I would not know the difference. The island is, perhaps, ready to simply swallow me at last.

Back when I still retained some sort of hope that I might get off of this island and see some sort of civilization again, I made use of the bottles I found here. It was difficult to put messages into them--all I had were tatters of clothes I had found, or taken off of my own back, on which to write. If I wanted to write something, I had to fashion a sharpened point from wood myself. And there were no animals around to prick for blood to use as ink, so I've had to prick myself. And having run low on bottles, and having never received help of any kind or any indication at all that my cries for help have reached anyone, I have chosen this last desperate measure.

I have a phone, but being a sailor by trade I do not use it often. There is no signal in the far reaches of the ocean, and indeed, I was unable to call for help on the _Tundra_ while it was drifting off in the fog, nor has it been of any use on this island, despite my occasional check to see if things have perhaps changed for any reason. Now that I am down to only one bottle left, and have no more foreseeable use for this device, I have chosen to sacrifice it. As it is unable to fit into the bottle on its own, I have written this on a notepad application, and taken the phone apart to fit the individual pieces inside. My one wish is for someone to find this, even if they shouldn't find me.

I am still here, waiting, though I do not know for how long. If you are able to piece this device back together, and find this note inside, please tell my family I loved them.

_Statement ends._


	20. Old Friend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for suicide themes.
> 
> Statement of Greyson Kirby, regarding an aquaintance. Original Statement given December 21st, 2003.
> 
> Statement begins.

I always hated church as a kid.

Going into my adulthood, I actually couldn't remember why. Up until recent years, I always just remembered it as being creeped out by the old churchyard, with all of those graves visible from the road, or the entryway, or even just from through the window inside. Cemeteries aren't welcoming places on any occasion, and churches get it worst, I think. There's always those stupid stone angels looking down on you, statues that are just a little too stone to look sympathetic or protective. Then there's how, when you're a child, you really can't help but associate God with death. It's just what gets into your brain, when you're young and have to walk past a field full of graves to go sing about the Holy Ghost.

Of course, the fact that my dad died when I was eight years old--suicide--didn't help my perspective, either.

Church and death had been fused in my mind more completely than ever, along with a healthy dose of pure misery. Laying there on the pew with my face buried in my mother's lap, sobbing. Standing there, at my dad's casket lowering, with the church bells tolling behind me, tears streaming down my face. Absolutely awful. And after that, I stopped going to church when I could help it. Mum still made me up until a certain point, but by the time I was fourteen, I was so sick of it I dug my heels in and she gave up.

And after that, I lived a relatively normal life as the only child of a single parent. Generally struggling to stay above the poverty line, but happy enough. I was very social as a kid. I think there was a distance between me and my mum that started with my dad's death that never really healed, and only got wider as time went on. We didn't dislike each other, we just both had our own ways of grieving and moving on. I didn't mind. I moved onto a college campus when I was nineteen, and was just a few weeks past my twentieth birthday and still enrolled in my courses when I got word that I was needed back home because of something to do with Dad.

It turns out, he'd had a will when he died. There had been something left to me, and it was...well, it was a gun.

Firearm laws should've made this fairly impossible for me to have. Things were looser back when Dad had owned it, slipping it under the radar by claiming it as an antique--which I thought was a bit of a stretch, even with the signs of age it bore. The note inserted in the will and the note attached reading "Practice before carrying it" definitely didn't help the case. I think the only reason it got back to me at all was some generous strings getting pulled, since Dad used to work with your Institute. Something about it being a valuable artifact, and broken. I don't think it's either of those things, but whatever. Either way, it passed into my possession. Mum and I agreed to keep it locked in its box, at least at first.

It was only a few days later that I saw the guy in the hood.

It's funny, how these things come back to you. I hadn't even remembered he existed for about a decade, but the minute I saw him it was like he'd never left. Things came rushing back, and my whole faded set of memories on why I hated the church with its creepy cemetery came back to me. It had nothing to do with the stone angels or the bad memories of a funeral, and everything to do with the guy in the hood, that I'd always seen hanging around. Even with how little of my childhood I truly remembered as an adult, I knew he looked exactly the same as all the other times I'd seen him, right up until the last time...which had been before Dad's suicide.

He had a stance like your average Joe, hands in pockets, weight on one foot. The black hoodie, black shoes, and blue jeans were the only features you could make out on him. Given that I was seeing him on the drive home from the market, getting some materials for when I went back to campus, and that he was only standing on the side of the street when I passed, I should've been able to see his face, but I couldn't. The inside of his hood was totally black. He was standing under a street light, so that was even spookier. His hood wasn't pointed at anything in particular, but I could feel him looking at me. Chills went up and down my spine, and I decided to drive home a little faster.

I saw him the next morning, the last day I was staying off-campus. I was taking a stroll out to visit some of my friends, since we rarely saw each other anymore, and he was standing in a park full of kids, about five hundred yards away from me when I was closest. I first took note that, yet again, he was definitely looking at me, even if I couldn't see his face to tell for sure. Then I noticed something odd. Random guy, standing out in all black, his face hidden and hands in his pockets, in a public park in the middle of the day? Any of the mothers attending to their children should've seen him and immediately called the cops. I even stopped to look around him, and I got the weird feeling that no one else could see him. But that was stupid, I told myself. 'There's no way you're seeing ghosts, now leave this dude alone since he's probably just minding his own business and doesn't appreciate you staring, and go about your business'.

But I was starting to get unnerved. After enjoying my day with my old bros, I went back to the house and, when Mum wasn't around, took the gun from its box. For all I knew, it really was broken, but it made me feel safer to have it, and I slept with it that night.

I went back to campus the next day, and the gun went with me. At first, I thought I was safe, since I went to classes rather far away from home and was now firmly out of reach of any creeps who might want to do me harm. I got to all my classes and did all of my work, and was just ready to go and get myself some dinner and have a good day when I saw him again, in the parking lot. And this time, there was no doubt about it. He wasn't on the sidewalk, or in any innocuous position, he was right in the middle of the lot, where he was liable to get run over if he stayed. People were walking right past him on their ways off campus. And there was no doubt about it, he was staring right at me, somewhere in the depths of that black hood where I couldn't see his face. i hadn't taken note of how close he was when I last saw him, but this time he was definitely standing closer than before.

Things continued like this for a few days, the guy in the hood appearing to me once a day for a couple of weeks. Closer each time, until I thought I might actually have to make the first move and either run him over, or just shoot him. I contacted some of the military brats I went to class with, who knew where to buy the right kind of ammo, and stocked up. The time when I finally had reason to freak out, as it happened, was when I was out for lunch and headed through a busy downtown street. I didn't actually see him, at first, but there's a small Sunday School that I was passing, built into the corner where the residential area turned into busy retail district. Tiny little bell, set into the space right above the door. But I heard it, loud and clear, and in that exact instant, I knew he would be there, whether I looked or not. I turned around, and sure enough, there he was on the street behind me, looking my way. The bell rang, and rang, and rang...and then he started walking.

In all my years, whether in present day or back in my childhood, I could not remember this figure ever actually moving. Seeing it walking towards me, striding, with purpose, terrified me. This was not a normal person, and I could only imagine he meant me harm. I started to retreat, at my own walking pace at first, then power-walking as he continued to walk inexorably closer. By the time I was on a street full of people, he was close enough for me to break into a jog, and then a sprint, attracting a ton of mystified looks as I ran full-tilt past people trying to get away from this guy.

I was twisting and turning, taking alleyways and going behind buildings, trying to lose him, and somewhere in the back of my head, some part of me knew it was hopeless. Each time I'd look back, he was closer, even though he never walked any faster than before. I finally ended up running down my final alley where I was presented with a wall I couldn't climb. I was panicking, and somehow I knew, just knew, that when this guy got a hold of me, I'd die. I finally took out the hand gun I'd been keeping with me ever since he'd first reappeared. I aimed it, and yelled loudly that if he didn't back off, I'd shoot. He didn't stop, didn't slow down, didn't speak. He just kept walking closer, and I saw him take one hand out of his pockets. Pale, with skeletal fingers and a bloat behind the wrist. I was shaking, and I didn't want to fire, but my back was literally against a wall, and he was maybe ten feet from me when I finally pulled the trigger. And he stopped.

There was no stumble, or recoil from being hit by a bullet. As far as I could tell, it hadn't even made a mark. He just stopped, as if considering me, then lowered his hand. He turned and stepped back, so I could see what I'd done. It was an old woman. This poor old woman, with a handbag and everything, eyes wide open and staring right at me, while a bloodstain spread down the front of her cardigan and shawl. A pressure seemed to lift off my ears, a ringing I hadn't noticed was there. I hadn't been able to hear anything over the church bells, which had finally stopped. I had no idea what she'd been saying, but I later realized she must've followed me, trying to see what had this poor young man so upset, see if I was safe, only to realize I was pointing a gun at her and I hadn't even heard her plead for her life. She fell to the ground with a thud, and as if that was what he'd been waiting for, the guy in the hood turned and strode toward her.

I didn't stick around to see what happened. Makes it easier to pretend he was just robbing her purse that way. Well, after that, I had to go on the run. I'd just shot a woman in what anyone around me would assume was cold blood. I sprinted back to my car, and drove right out of the county, and have been laying low ever since.

There isn't a set schedule for when he arrives. I can tell when the life I've most recently taken has sated his hunger, and when he's getting hungry again. I've tried to...I've tried to make sure it was only bad people, people who deserved it, but there've been times when it just wasn't playing out that way, and I had to make the choice.

And I can't live with that anymore.

Twelve years to the day of my dad's death. Twelve rings of the church bells. Seems fitting I'd last a solid twelve months.

Do you know what it's like? To kill, to keep yourself going? It's not just 'easier' not to think about it, it's the only way you manage. This fucking guilt...I almost think that's part of the Guy in the Hood's plan. Make me realize how I can't justify things, until the guilt eats away at me and I finally off myself or let him take me. And hey, it worked.

I've killed eleven people, counting the old woman. An old man who was beating his wife, and a drug dealer with a tight pimp fist on a few haggard women. A real freak who tortured animals, and an abusive aunt who was stealing from the kids she was looking after. I didn't get lucky enough to ice any politicians. There was a high school kid who probably never did anything wrong in his life. An orderly who was harassing the elderly patients in his care. A coach that got fired for perving on the girls in his gym class. A dog-fighting ringmaster. A dad who was shamelessly teaching his kid to be a bullying brat. A guilt-ridden drunk driver who was about to kill himself anyway. 

Even one was too much. I should've let him take me that first day. It was an accident...and once it started, I just had to keep it going.

But if he wants a twelfth one, it'll have to be me. I've gone back and forth about blowing my brains out, but I've decided to just let him take me instead. For the record, I still don't think the gun is cursed, or haunted. I think it's just a weapon my dad gave me, for when the time came. I wonder, if he was trying to buy me extra time when he offed himself. Or maybe he was just a coward who wanted to offer me the chance to be a coward, too. I haven't had the chance to look up whether he killed anyone himself. I suppose these are questions I'll get to ask the guy in the hood when he comes for me.

So, yeah, this is my statement. You can show it to the police, if you want. It'll explain a few homicides that probably seemed like the work of a random lunatic. I don't expect I'll be here long enough to arrest.

_Statement ends._


	21. Salt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Eddie Cochran, regarding his time as a salt miner. Original statement given March 16th, 2014, transferred from the Usher Foundation May 14th of that year.
> 
> Statement begins.

Mines and quarries are not the sorts of places you would think would get reopened after being abandoned. And when they do reopen, it's usually as tourist attractions, and not actual mining.

Believe it or not, traditional mining isn't dead. Yeah, the bulk of the work is done by machines, now, but there are still places, like out in Utah, where if mining becomes a serious thing, it will require a human touch.

One such place was the salt mine I took a job at. And yes, we were mining salt, since it was a rather cold winter. The polar vortex had just dipped low again, and with the record lows came record amounts of snowfall, thus requiring record amounts of salt to clear it all away. I got posted in northern Utah at a mine that had been abandoned for quite a while, and was apparently located just around the site of some equally-abandoned Mormon parish from the 1800s. People were sent in with shovels and pickaxes, wearing vests and hardhats, to try and get at some of the salt that was still stored deep down in those tunnels where production had cut off.

It's hard work, but I'm used to hard work. Been a construction worker all my life, and it's not that different. For my first time working in a mine, though, it was definitely something new. Much cooler down in those tunnels, which is not a good thing in the dead of a very cold winter. Very dark down there, and if you had your helmet light on or were close enough to a lamp, you could see your breath in the air. Speaking of, the air. Any mine is a danger zone for contaminants, up to requiring gas masks, but salt mines are particularly bad about it, with the dehydrating effects that salt in the air will have on you. We were required to work part of our shifts in a gas mask, and were given regular water breaks, so there was that.

Because this mine wasn't well-mapped or extensively so, we were encouraged to keep in contact via radio while following the salt veins down into the depths, though we were discouraged from going too far or from digging past a certain point. But as long as we were bringing rock salt back in the pans and carts, they really didn't care where we went. I wasn't stupid enough to disobey strict regulations, not when I knew that mining was a business so poorly regulated that having any at all meant following them was serious business. But it was contract work--more salt mined equaled a fatter envelope of cash. My hope was, if I managed to find a really big salt vein, I could go home with a bigger paycheck. So I had some incentive to explore.

You do need some nerves to do it, mind. Dark, cold, and spooky, not to mention there's always the danger of collapse. This particular mine hadn't been subject to explosive accidents in its heyday, but thankfully management was smart enough not to try going for the dynamite route. But every mine has its unstable areas, and those only get more unstable the more you dig, it's not for the claustrophobic sorts. But money can drive men to ignore a great many dangers, you understand.

The first sign of danger was the crack. I was wandering along an unmapped tunnel in the dark one afternoon, with my helmet light on to see by. Just pitch black directly beyond my line of sight, and the stone uniformly greyish-white, so that I had to feel along the wall for the salt. This was a big one, and I knew I'd be raking in good money just as soon as I could get permission to excavate down here. And while walking along, the blackness in front of me was pierced by a light in the distance. At first, I thought that I must've gotten turned around, since I assumed the light was coming from another floor lamp. But it wasn't. It was actually a solid wall bearing a single, slight crack, and as I got close enough to it, I realized light was coming from behind it.

Now that was odd. It was always still possible I had spelunked myself right in a circle and come up to the back end of another, better-understood tunnel where someone had stored a lamp, but as I looked on, I quickly realized this wasn't possible. A crack in a wall this thin, that I could feel this much of a draft against? Someone would've reported it. But the real kicker was that that definitely wasn't a floor lamp. The light was flickering back and forth, you see.

Remember those regulations I told you about? Yeah, fire of any kind is explicitly prohibited. Even though explosives weren't being used in present day, there was always the chance that a stray flame could ignite chemicals dusting walls or the air and trigger a huge explosion. You don't even get to smoke on the premises, it's like having an open flame atop an oil tanker. Whatever was sitting on the other side of this crack was definitely against the rules and somebody was probably going to get fired over it.

I couldn't see through the crack enough to catch the actual light source, but its light spread far enough to see into the tunnel beyond. It was clearly man-made, not natural, so I did wonder if it might be worth it to try and break down the wall. With how narrow it was, it was unlikely anything would collapse on me, right? Breaking through and putting out the fire would be much faster than simply going all the way back up the tunnel I'd come through just to let management know about a flame in a tunnel I couldn't give them directions down into. But I chickened out, decided I didn't want to risk it, and besides, if the flame hadn't set anything off by now, it probably wasn't going to, right? So I left it alone. Turned back and upward, and found a more suitable spot to fill up a pan and finish up for the day.

Couldn't get that dumb little thing out of my mind, though. Told my shift buddy Gunther about the tunnel I'd investigated and the little curious thing I'd found at the end of it, and he definitely agreed that it was suspicious. It would be awesome, he thought, if I dug through and found myself in old Native American ruins, wouldn't it? Be a way faster paycheck than digging up table condiments. He also had something he wanted to tell me about too, which was a tunnel he had found that was unmapped and probably led to the biggest salt vein he'd ever seen in his life. I did wonder for a moment why, if there was so much salt to be dug out here, the mine had shut down in the first place. He was too big to get through the entrance, but he figured I might be able to do it. I told him I'd think about it, but I didn't have any desire to get trapped between a rock and a hard place.

The next day, I went back down the tunnel where I'd found the crack. I remember getting a little turned around, since there were a few branching paths, but following the salt vein led me true, and eventually I saw the dead end with the crack in the distance. I realized a funny thing that I should have the first time, which was that I couldn't see my breath anymore. It was warmer down here than in the other tunnels. Moreso than it should have been by the distance I was from the flame. I drew nearer and nearer, and nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a noise.

It was definitely a voice, making some sort of hocking sound. I whirled around, looking for the person who made it, and then realized the tunnel was empty but for me. At least, my side of the tunnel was. I went further in, towards the crack, and peered through it. The flickering light on the opposite wall now cast a shadow. I immediately opened my mouth to reprimand whoever it was, and sound had left my mouth before I cut myself off, realizing that the shadow was bare of any details that should've been present on a miner. In fact, the shadow was almost skeletal. I ducked to the side, hastily shutting off my helmet light and burying myself in the darkness again. I could hear shuffling on the other side of the wall. Throaty, guttural sounds, kind of like that of an animal, were reaching my ears. I heard whoever it was very closeby, and I knew when the flickering light went out that they had to be pressing an eye or an ear to the crack. I stayed dead quiet and still, and eventually, the light bled onto my side again. More throaty sounds, and then shuffling that sounded like someone walking away down a tunnel on the other side.

I didn't breathe easy for quite a while. The shadow had definitely resembled a human, but the sounds...and the slight wetness of the footfalls. What was going on here?

I finished by salt panning and went back up to the surface to inform management that there was a possibility someone unauthorized was down in the mines, hiding in the tunnels. He asked if I was sure, and I said yes, and the miners were called out while a security team was sent in for retrieval. They never found anyone, though.

Gunther was pissed with me, of course. Most of the mining staff were. Convinced I was freaking out over nothing and had put everyone off their work because I was jumpy. But since they never found anyone, we were allowed to get back to work pretty quickly. I was still spooked, though, and didn't go down that tunnel again.

But my curiosity started to peak again, soon. Even though I didn't want to return to the crack, I did still want to find as much salt as possible. So eventually, I took Gunther up on his offer to try and investigate one of the bigger salt veins and the tunnel it led down. After a few days of nothing, it was easier to calm down about the thing I'd found in the mines. Who knew, maybe I really had just spooked myself?

So Gunther led me down the tunnel areas he was responsible for, and along the lamplit path, he took a right down a darker side tunnel, and then a left. At first I didn't see what he was talking about. Then I realized that the wall didn't extend all the way to the floor, where there was a gap. I couldn't see any light from beyond it, but when we crouched down and shone our helmet lights into it, it was clear that the gap extended quite a ways.

"D'you think it goes somewhere?" I asked him, and he shrugged. I decided against exploring it, though, and he called me a pussy. And after that, well, I had to, didn't I?

So I got down on my belly and crawled underneath the rock making up the dead end. It was grueling, but I'd done harder, and I called back to him to be ready to drag me back out if I should get stuck and unable to move on any further.

The gap under the wall widened the further I go, and it went on for quite some time. I must've crawled on my belly for maybe ten minutes before the space got just wide enough to crouch in. After that, another five minutes or so of waddling forward on hands and knees. I noticed two things as I kept moving forward. Number one, the smell of salt, which was already saturating the air throughout the entire mining quarry, was becoming stronger, almost overpowering. I could look around and see nearly the entire walls around me made of it, so it was clear Gunther had been on the money about this salt vein leading to a bigger deposit. Number two, the area was getting warmer. I was starting to sweat in my coat, and I noticed that the rock around me was barely cool.

After finding a ledge that I could crawl up onto, I found myself not in a cave, but in an actual room, a place carved out of the salt in the walls. I was spooked, yes, but not enough to stop. There was more light here, and I saw that there were metal grates set on the floor, bearing burning wood. Definite signs of habitation here. It was actually quite warm, and it was well-lit enough that I turned off my helmet lamp. From here, there were two routes I could go. The path to the left sloped downward, while the one on the right went upward. I decided on the right path, and pulled myself up.

Though there weren't any stairs or hand railings, the smoothness of the walls defied natural architecture. Someone had carved this out, and it would've taken a group of people to do so. I kept a hand in my pocket, where I always kept my trusty switchblade, just in case I needed it. The floor torches kept my way lit, and I followed the path until it finally opened up.

The sight was... 'insane' doesn't quite do it justice, but it comes close.

It was a _chapel_. I was standing on a ledge set above an absolutely enormous room carved out of the raw rock salt. Looking down below, I could see raised blocks that had been carved around to form tables and seats, and there was an altar-like block that bore a set of candles. There were crosses and angel statues and other Christian iconography carved into the walls. The smell of salt was overpowering, and I could see people down there.

It was a congregation. Twenty, maybe thirty people. None of them wore clothes. None of them had skin. The vivid red of their flesh contrasted hideously with the off-white of the salt around them. And they were speaking, in those same guttural tones, but I could recognize English. A single central one was leading the others, and their recitations seemed to be centered on the salt.

"Salt purifies. It cleanses all."

"It bleaches the world, lending its burn to our meals and our hide."

"We live in its veins, and so too does it live in ours."

They were talking about making themselves closer to the salt, closer to the earth in its purest form. It was a bizarrely fascinating scene, even if it was horrifying. How long had these people been down there? How did they live here in secret without anyone noticing? The full terror of what I was seeing and the danger I was in didn't fully penetrate until the little congregation raised their heads towards the ceiling to sing a hymn of some sort, and one of them noticed me on the ledge. It gave a throaty growl and a scream, and pointed to me, drawing all the others' gazes. I stepped back, nearly tripping over my own feet, and I saw some of them break from a group into a mass of people heading for another hole in the wall, obviously coming after me. The others moved toward me and just started climbing the wall underneath me.

Well, I ran for it. I ran back down the path I came to the first carved-out room, where I could hear more growling voices, and threw myself down the next ledge into the tunnel. I crawled on hands and knees as fast as I could, then on my arms, worming as fast I could underneath the rock and back towards the dark tunnel where Gunther was waiting. After way too long, I finally made it, him helping to drag me out and asking me what was so wrong. I took him by the arm and dragged him all the way back up to the main quarry. I grabbed the officials handling things in the office and started ranting about what I had found down there and how everyone was in danger, and...well, yeah. I sounded crazy.

I was laid off. The mine was searched, and, naturally, they found nothing, but this time I was determined to convince them. Even though I wasn't allowed to be on shift (or, technically, on the site), I arrived anyway, dragging the security team first down the tunnel with the crack in the wall. The crack was gone. Then I dragged them down Gunther's tunnel, and tried to show them the gap under the wall. It had sealed up.

So, yeah, now I looked even crazier than before, swearing that it had been there and that they had to believe me. I was escorted off the premises.

The mine closed down a few days later anyway, because a miner's body was found in a tunnel, flayed of his skin.

_Statement ends._


	22. Street Racing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Miles Sykes, regarding his auto mechanic. Original statement given February 20th, 2018.
> 
> Statement begins.

Let's face facts here: I'm short.

I'm funny, I have a great personality, I can cook, I can hold my drinks, I even have a big dick, but goddamn it, I'm short. And since that's one of the first things people notice about me, it's always the first thing they talk about, and the first thing they tease anyone about at parties. I'm not all that sensitive about it these days, but it's just tiresome. So I guess it made sense that, growing up, I turned towards cars as a way to stand out.

I do love cars. Though I prefer muscle cars, they don't have to be flashy if they perform well, and I can always pay for a paint job I like. Whatever they say about what women are or aren't into, the fact is, _everybody_ will notice if you have a nice car. And since I like that attention so much, I recently decided to try something fun and get into street racing. Yes, I know, totally illegal, but let's be honest, do I care? Not as long as it's getting me an admiring social circle full of jealous guys and hot girls. So I did some digging around, and found some guys who could point in the right directions. I wanted to get into street racing, and I'm a pretty pro driver, so what I really needed was mods.

And that was how I met Gunner.

I was completely out of the loop on this guy, but every in-the-know guy I talked to about hardcore car mods swore by him. Apparently he and his partner were from Detroit, but swung by the UK about once a year, and he was the genuine article where auto mechanics were concerned. Could turn anything from a broken-down scrapyard piece of junk all the way from a big gray football mum Volvo into a racing beast. I liked the sound of that, although I didn't necessarily like to imagine how much it would cost. I...may have foolishly agreed to my first street race before actually getting my car modded. Yeah, I know, dumb as shit, but in my defense, I wasn't _totally_ unprepared. I just wanted to be sure. And I also really wanted to impress everyone watching, not to mention try and feel things out for my first time with mods built for speed and precision.

So, I had some guys tell me where to go. The body shop I was looking for was incredibly out-of-the way, stitched right onto the slum end of North London. Just a single-room shop squashed inbetween the two adjacent buildings. It had a little more space inside than I would've thought, probably because it extended right into the alleyway behind it and onto the street on the other side. A lot of red paint, so I guessed that this guy might be an aggressive kind of individual. The smell of motor oil and gasoline was everywhere, and that gave me a great high, made me feel ready to race. If I've given the impression I only like cars because I'm an attention whore, let me correct you, I really do enjoy driving as my passion. So I was hoping this guy was everything they said he was.

There were a few other cars I had to wait on, and once they pulled out, I could get in and see what this guy was like, and whether I trusted him with my Camaro. I pulled up, and parked and got out, and immediately saw a guy I was not sure I liked.

There were two men here, both leaning over the hood of what I took to be one of their projects, and they were _big_. I mean, every tall guy looks big from down here, but these guys were tall _and_ jacked. Quintessential auto-mechanics, these two, sleeveless shirts and bare arms alike covered in grease, baggy torn jeans on both of them. One was dark-haired, with a tattoo of a sheathed knife on his forearm, had a single ear pierced and was only slightly leaner, and his shirt was red and his jeans black, and he had earbuds hanging around his shoulders. The other guy was dirty blond, in a gray muscle shirt and blue jeans hung halfway down his waist, both ears pierced with bars. Both arms had tattoos up and down the length of them, and they looked like some kind of violent scene involving feathers, but I couldn't make out any more than that. I asked if one of them was Gunner, and the blond one straightened up and turned towards me.

And...ahh. Erm.

Now, see here, I'm not some homophobe or nothing, I just...I didn't like the way this guy _looked_ at me, yanno? Didn't like the way either of them looked at me, actually, they both had these half-lidded looks on their faces that made them look a little drunk, or maybe high. But the blond one, Gunner, he had this...I don't know what else to call it, a _leer_. He was lookin' me up and down, all five-foot-three of me, and not hiding it, and I felt even smaller as he did it. That half-grin on his face, and those yellowish eyes, they made me feel like he was sizing up something to eat. He holds out his hand, and I take it, and holy shit, his hands are big. While he's got my hand in his freakin' animal paw, he glances towards my car, and then back to me, and his smile twitched into a grin, and then he introduced himself, in this _real_ heavy American drawl.

And I told him, in what I'm ashamed to say was not the manliest of voices, that I was called Miles Sykes, and I wanted some body work done on my baby. And he goes,

'Listen ta you squeak, there, Miles! Immuna call you _little mouse_ , z'at okay with you?"

"Ah, well--"

"Great."

I really did _not_ want him calling me that, but I'll be damned if I was gonna tell this guy off for any reason. What, and get the shit beaten outta me? So I just skipped it and told him my situation. And that grin on his face grew bigger by the second as I explained that I was interested in street racing, and I had heard he could transform my car into a racing beast. And he promised that he could, but that any car was limited by the abilities of its driver. So I kind of puffed out my chest a bit and told him I was the best driver he'd see today, maybe all week. He raised both eyebrows at this, and chewed the inside of his cheek. He had real sharp teeth, I noticed, so that must've hurt a bit. What kind of mods was I looking for, what was the race, and where was it happening, and when, he asked. Said he might want to spectate on it. I think that was a test, in retrospect. I gave him the site, date, and time, and he sticks his hands in his pockets and sizes me up again. And he told me he'd give me the mods, and if I won, he wouldn't even charge me for them.

I asked for the price range if I lost, and he told me, and I winced, but I was feeling like I wanted this, yanno? So we shook on it and I gave him my information, and he went to work, loaning me a moped to get around on while I was waiting for my car back. When the time came for him to call me back, I drove over, and my car didn't look that different, outside maybe being a bit lower to the ground and now bearing twin exhaust pipes. But he assured me that it would drive smoother than silk and faster than lightning. He urged me to get some practice on it before the big race, since while he'd be happy to fix any damages to the car incurred between now and then so long as it wasn't totaled, it wouldn't be covered on the whole 'free if you win' bit. He handed me the invoice, and sure enough, there it was in the fine print.

I was ecstatic. I've never driven a car that was so sensitive, but controlled. I took it out onto the straight roads out in the sticks, just to see how fast I could get it up to before it started protesting. I was pretty impressed with what I saw. Of course, I still had to get in practice on proper roads. I always drove a little faster than necessary for the next few days, though not enough to endanger others. The guys behind this race seemed pretty responsible, so I figured I'd get to flex the car's real muscles in the real deal.

And when it finally came, that night where everyone was watching as I took on my opponent, both of us revving our engines in a big ol' dick-waving contest before the signal was shot, I saw him in the crowd. Gunner was peering at me from the sidelines, meeting my eyes, his own hazel ones so bright in his skull they made my nerves twice as bad. But the race itself? Easy. And I do mean _easy_. The other guy couldn't keep pace with me throughout the entire thing, and I actually scared myself with how fast I could go. There were some close calls on the sharper turns, but I made it through, over the finish line a good three seconds before my competitor. A solid win. I slid to a stop, got out, and punched the air, and everybody around me was hollering and some people were clapping, and my friends were running over to clap me on the back...and I see Gunner striding over.

This hadn't been a closed circuit race, and we were actually a long damn ways from the starting line, so I remember vaguely wondering how he could've beaten me here, what route he must've taken, but I didn't care. He strode over, and I was feeling so good I didn't even care as he gave me that too-sharp grin and hovered a little closer than necessary when pounding me on the back. And he tells me,

"Good driving, little mouse. Duncan's going to be mad. He bet me you couldn't win this."

And I say, "All the better, now you got the price of your mod work back, right?"

And he leans in real close, and shushes me, jerking his head towards the competition, who'd just ridden up and looked ill, and was peering our way. I was sure Gunner wouldn't have minded the business, but he was right to think I wasn't down to hear the word "rematch" dated just far enough away that he could mod his own car to hell and back to try and pull one over on me. Then he told me that, since I'd pushed my car pretty hard just now, I should roll it over to his shop for a few hours just so he could fine-tune things, make sure everything was still in working order and nothing had overheated. I was happy to do it, and he even lent me a full-on motorcycle so I could meet up with my friends for drinks that night and still see their eyes pop. All in all, I was feeling so good that I was willing to forgive how unsettling he was.

So I went out, I had my drinks, I got a couple numbers from girls, including one that would've blown me right there in the parking lot if I'd asked it of her, and I didn't even feel like puking my guts out at the end of it. Probably shouldn't have been driving, but since I made it to the auto-shop on the motorbike okay, I figured I was alright. It was well past eleven p.m. when I rolled up, and I remember thinking something was off. Shouldn't the shop have still been open? The garage door was open, but there was no one out to meet me, and there were no lights on. It felt real eerie as I drove in, like my lights were going to wake someone up. Maybe he was asleep? I park, and I look around, and there's my car waiting, and I find my keys hanging on the wall. I walk over, and there's a note from Gunner, telling me that everything was in good condition and to just take the car whenever I was ready.

I scowled. Was he really dumb enough to just leave my baby in an open garage, with its keys perfectly accessible to any thieving rat who wanted to take it? What if my competitor had rolled up? But I took it, and I figured maybe he was tired from working all day and I should give him a break. I leave the motorcycle against the wall, figuring it was his own problem if he got robbed, and I take my keys and go get in my car, and I start it up, ready to head out.

And the instant I turn the keys in the ignition and hear the engine start, headlights flood the garage and my rear-view mirror. The undercurrent, the _wrong_ -ness I'd been feeling around Gunner, it all mounted in the moment I looked in the mirror and saw him behind the wheel of a car directly behind me. I saw his yellow eyes, with his pupils now looking like slits, and his jaws full of teeth as he licked his lips. He had a mad grin on his face, and he was revving his engine.

I slammed my foot on the pedal, scraping the wall as I tore out of the garage and onto the street, and he was following me at a leisurely pace, right up until we were both safely between the buildings on either side and could speed up. Then he came haring after me, and I went even faster trying to get away from him. I could feel him hitting my rear bumper whenever a stretch of road went on for too long, and I knew he meant to kill me, would cause me to crash or just crunch my car underneath his if it came to it. I ran red light after red light, speeding past cars honking their horns, trying desperately not to hit anything. Every time I took a sharp turn to try and shake him off, I would fear I'd be too slow gunning it, and he'd slam right into me. I'd hear a crash just after I got my car speeding down the next alleyway, and I'd think he'd be dead, only for him to catch back up to me less than a minute later, or come barreling out of another alleyway as I passed it in the street.

I've never been through anything more terrifying. I've never felt less drunk. What was this guy doing?! Why was he trying to kill me?! I hadn't done anything to him! In fact, I'd thought we were cool! Was he trying to cull me for daring to win the race, was that it? Was he expecting me to lose, and angry he'd lost money he was supposed to make? I didn't know why, but I knew I had to lose this guy. Either he was going to kill me, or he was going to kill someone else trying to get to me. It was a wonder there were no cops chasing us down already, with how we were speeding across the city in twists and turns with no regard for who was around us. Eventually, though, I needed to get out from under these buildings before I just crashed outright, with or without his help. And I ended up doing the stupidest, most hair-rippingly stupid thing I could've done...I turned out, onto the straight roads, out in the sticks.

It was stupid, it was moronic! I should've stayed where it was populated, so at least when I finally died, someone might see who had caused it. And if I couldn't lose him in a maze of streets and buildings and bridges, what chance did I have to lose him if I cleared everything away and just pit his engine against mine? He was the auto-mechanic with all the genius. There was no way in hell my ride was going to out-perform his ride.

And it didn't. Driving out there, with nothing but flat field on either side of us, stretching out into farmland, there was nothing to put between him and me, nothing to slow him down. He hit my rear bumper once, twice, and while I was pressing my foot as hard on the pedal as it would go, begging my car to go faster than the 190 miles per hour it was going, I saw him lag behind a bit. I knew what was going to happen, and tried to twist my wheels and turn off of the road, make him go past me, but his car was a lot quicker on the uptake than mine. He slammed into me harder than ever, and I was sent spinning down the road.

I should've died, of course. I should've been dead a million times over, with the way my car was spinning out off of the road, flipping over, crashing and crunching and twisting all around me, bouncing across the field on the right side of the road. But somehow, by the grace of God or Fate or whatever the hell is out there, instead of hurdling through the windshield when the car tumbled over a rock, my door flew open and I was flung out of it, the entire car just barely missing my head as I rolled over the grass. It flew over me, and finished skidding to a halt. I dragged my head up off of the dirt, and blinked out blood and filth, and saw the engine of my car explode. A piece of shrapnel buried itself in the grass next to me. And then I heard the still-living engine as it rolled up in the distance. I whirled around, picking myself up on skidded palms as Gunner's car, an old Jaguar shined up in black that was inky and undented before all the abuse it had taken tonight, came trundling over, stopping some seventy, eighty feet from me.

I saw him get out of his car, eyes still bright and slitted, a small smile not quite reaching them. I saw him stuff his keys into his pocket as he walked my way. I saw his lower jaw change shape, extend, filling with longer, sharper teeth while saliva dripped out when he ran his tongue across them.

I got up and tried to run of course, and it was hopeless. He broke into a run too, and in a matter of two or three seconds, I heard him behind me, murmuring in my ear like we were standing still.

"Gotcha."

He threw himself on me, and we went tumbling, and I ended up on my back and he was on top of me, his fingers tipped with nails that had elongated into these awful, wicked claws. There was still some hint of a smile in his twisted, hungry leer as he leaned over me. And he said, with this awful growl,

"You did damn fine, little mouse..."

I couldn't get him off of me, I was nowhere near strong enough. I know that if I'd been a second later, my throat would've been ripped out. But I think I made up for the earlier stupidity, just then. Cuz he was leaning down over me, and pinning me by the shoulders, and I...I reached into his pocket and grabbed his keys. And I jammed the car key right into his left eye socket. He recoiled, letting out a cry of pain, and I slipped out from underneath him, kicked him off and yanked them back out in one go. He was howling, and I made a break for it. I blitzed it back towards his car, and I got in and jammed the gore-covered keys in the ignition. In the headlights flooding the field, I saw him stagger up and run back towards his car, not even holding a hand over his bloody eye, and I did the only thing that made sense, and gunned it.

I don't know if it's always like this when you run over someone, as I hadn't done it before and haven't done it since, but I think it's about the same as slamming into a wall. He went under the car, alright, but I bounced so hard I thought my head would go straight through the roof of the car. I made it over his body, and kept going, and as I was building up speed, I looked in the rear-view mirror. I saw him rolling, but then I saw him hurtling to his feet, running after me, and _gaining_. I slammed the pedal again, and went rocketing down the road, and after way longer than it should've taken, I'd left him behind.

I didn't slow down until I was long away from the crash site and back in a populated area. I couldn't think of any place to go but home, even though I didn't feel good about going there. It was pretty far from his auto shop, sure, but after what I'd seen, sitting still didn't feel safe. Hiding in my flat, waiting for him to track me down like a bloodhound and tear into me. I could picture his silhouette in my doorway all too easily. I resolved not to sleep, and I made it until 5 a.m. before my adrenaline wore out and I fell unconscious at my windowsill where I'd been looking out of it for signs of shadows under the street lamp.

I woke up ten hours later, cheek stuck to the cool glass by a film of drool. The sun was just setting, and I was so confused. I wasn't dead. I'd been left in peace...or by dumb luck, Gunner hadn't found me.

Well, what was I going to do, then? I couldn't just walk everywhere, could I? But if I drove around in that Jaguar, it would get back to the police that I was riding around in a stolen vehicle, and he'd get me. I resolved to at least try and grab some groceries for my inevitable trip out of the county, maybe out of the country. I walked over to the supermarket, taking a back alley, and that was my mistake.

Just as I was walking up behind the building, someone rounded the corner, wearing red and black. The sense of familiarity struck me a second too late, as by the time I'd realized it was Duncan and turned around to flee, he'd already grabbed me. He swung me around, and had me by the throat, and then I was being held above eye level against the wall, legs dangling uselessly underneath me a good foot off the ground. I choked just a bit, and he relaxed his hold, but I still couldn't break free. I was too terrified to speak, and he said to me,

"Your name is Miles, right? Gunner tells me you gave him one of the best chases of his life last night. He's thrilled, wouldn't shut up about it. You come back around the auto shop, y'hear? We wanna see you again."

And he drops me on the ground and walks off.

The way he said it, like I was some interesting new pal, like I'd done something to really be proud of that we could all laugh off...I don't know what the hell is up with those two. But needless to say, i didn't take him up on his offer. I didn't go anywhere near that auto shop and haven't seen either of them since. If I have the right of it, they've recently left to go back to Detroit. Good riddance.

I guess the one good thing about it is, since he didn't come back for it, I got to keep the Jaguar.

_Statement ends._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, I'm not okay, I'm still limping, if you'll notice. ...I thought it would be funny! I was just teasing him! I don't think it deserved being kicked in the balls! 'Fuck you, he tried to eat me', well fuck you, now I can't have kids! Ow, damn it.


	23. Empty Warehouse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Brennan Torres, regarding his career as a warehouse stocker. Original statement given July 13th, 2012. 
> 
> Statement begins.

I spent two years working for a warehouse under Doran Domnhall LLC.

I had not been having a good life for quite a while. The recession hit me hard in 2008, and money was tight, and it stayed that way through a lot of troubles. I had a lot of college debt piling on, and not making enough money drove a lot of the rows between me and my then-girlfriend. She cheated on me, and I broke up with her, then _I_ got dragged through the mud for cheating. Which I hadn't done, but since I'd cheated on an ex in 2005, it didn't really matter to her posse of girlfriends once they got a hold of it. Truth is, though, that with the money the college was demanding, I kind of needed her income to balance things out, and losing it tipped me over the edge. After rent and insurance, I wasn't able to purchase the materials for the classes, so I flunked out...and thus, my tuition fees were due immediately, putting me in more debt.

Mum and Dad weren't willing to loan me any money, and though I hadn't had the door shut in my face on the possibility of moving back in with them, I really did not want to. I really did not get along with them at all, and the last thing I needed to lose the rest of my remaining friends was to move back in and sleep on Mum's couch like the very image of the pathetic loser people kept saying I was. I was looking for a better, higher-paying job that would take a college dropout right up until I failed to make rent and got thrown out faster than the garbage.

Needless to say, I alienated my friends anyway, as I was spending a lot of time in emotional upset by this point. It was mostly anger, I was just constantly angry, but it was also fear, and sadness, and self-hatred...

I was asking for too much. I was going to end up sleeping on someone else's couch, if not in my car, never able to pay off these debts, never able to get a faithful girl, never able to move up in life...so, when I got an email from a contractor offering a manual labor job paying a great salary and asking for nothing but a stable, halfway-healthy body that could lift, I didn't think "That's too good to be true", I thought "Fuck it, not gonna get another chance like this, I'll take it."

As soon as I arrived, I was given forms to sign, and my god it was the most boring thing I've ever done. I don't think I've ever liked filing out employee data forms, listing out every single personal detail of myself like that. But somehow, this was worse than usual--it just seemed to go on, and on, and on, never stopping until I had divulged every last little morsel. When at last I was done, I was immediately handed a uniform and driven down to the warehouse and given a short tour of both the place and my responsibilities, then told to get to work.

Mind, this was in August, so it was still pretty hot. But this was a night job, and the evenings weren't so warm that a thick coat would've been unwelcome. My tour accounted for about twenty names, no surnames included, and being shown where to put things and where my various duties were. While I was being assigned as a stocker for now, I was told, I'd be learning every area of the warehouse and cycling through duties alongside my coworkers. And I remember, while I was being given this tour by a manager I can't even remember the general shape or voice of, that it was _bitterly_ cold. I could just about see my breath. I supposed they kept it that way so that working such long hours in the sort of uniform they'd given me wouldn't be totally unbearable.

You see, everyone around me was wearing identical outfits. All black, all of it--the baseball caps were black and thick, with no mesh to see the hair through, along with black work tees, thick black cargo pants that must've been double-threaded, since you couldn't even see through the rips, black sneakers, and on top of it all, a really, really thick black work coat. There were even black gloves, though they were fingerless so as not to impede the work. Putting it all on and wearing it was an experience, I tell you. It felt trapped, stifling, seemed to cling like a second skin...but at the same time, it felt protective. There was so much cloth on me that I really felt the barrier between me and the air, between me and the outside world.

My fellow staff were all friendly, and helpful when I needed it, although there didn't tend to be much talk with how heavy-duty and constant the work was. Somehow they all knew my name after only one introduction and never needed to ask again. I remember how they all seemed inhumanly big and tall, and how none of them ever seemed to strain with what they were lifting, or bump into anything. Their faces were...I don't want to say 'indistinct', but I never spent a lot of time looking at them, you know? And not a lot of them ever looked at me all that much. Their caps tended to shadow their faces, so I would see a mouth moving, maybe a nose, but never meet anyone's eyes. Every once in a while, if I did get a good look at someone's face, I might note how their features didn't match up with what I'd think of when I thought of their name.

It wasn't as though I couldn't talk to them, I could. They would engage me in chatter if I started some up, or occasionally approach me. Some would tell me about their lives, and I'd listen in to their daily workings, which ranged from monotonous to dramatic. If I ever vented about how shitty my life had been up to this point, I usually found a sympathetic ear, and they'd agree with whatever I'd said, and reassure me that it was in the past and I should let it detach and drift away from me, and then they'd offer me outside to have a smoke with them, or over to a corner to have a drink. The sodas we shared were all easily kept ice-cold by the ambient temperature. I once asked them why it was so cold in here, and one of them--Dirk, I think--said it "keeps out the critters".

The materials were kind of weird, too, now I think on it. The packages we were getting ready to ship and offloading ranged from tiny all the way to big enough to require ten men, and somehow I never saw what was inside any of them. There were never any accidents that spilled the contents, and if I ever got curious and looked, all I'd see on the side of it was "this side up", or "fragile: do not jostle". There were packages that occasionally moved from the inside, and although this peaked my interest, none of them were big enough or the right shape to contain a person, or any animal that'd make for popular black market pet, so I just treated them with the same indifference everyone else did. Looking at the trucks didn't tend to help, as they were usually featureless. As for "critters", I eventually found out what I was supposed to be on guard for. One time, a coworker named Jensen checked a package, and my eye spotted a black packing peanut scurrying out of sight. He closed it right quick, and beckoned me to help him as we carried it...well, out into a ditch just outside the premises, and he lit it on fire. I stared at him blank, until he told me that the 'creatures' liked to try and sneak in through the shipments to get to faraway places.

While everyone around me did have an unsettling sort of uniformity, I also got to interact with the people bringing in the shipments. Most of the time they were clearly normal, usually a little on edge around me or the other boys. I do, however, recall a few that were clearly not normal. Some would be covered in dirt, others would have white, seemingly-blind eyes. Some would only ever come in really, really bad weather, and at least one time, I met a driver who was very plainly filthy and covered in pus, and sniffling. I had just seen a fly crawl out from under his hairline when a few of my coworkers strode up behind me and got very, very aggressive with that one. Only time I've ever seen any of 'em express a lot of emotion, when they were threatening and getting physical with 'Filth Man' until he finally left. One of them muttered something about the 'corrupted not being welcome here'.

As I say, I worked there for two years. And honestly...it was good. I liked it.

It was an all-night job that always left me exhausted, so I slept a lot during the day and really only had parts of the afternoon and my evenings free, and thus I didn't spend a lot of time in contact with people I'd known. Phones weren't banned on-shift, and honestly nobody even cared if you dicked around and texted, it was just that we worked a shift where most other people were asleep. I didn't really care to keep in contact with the people I knew during my daily life, anyway. I was making a huge paycheck, even if I was living out of my car for a while, and for some reason it didn't bother me that none of them ever seemed to call me during the day. They used to, but I suppose they stopped bothering since, being exhausted during the day, I rarely answered. Considering how low-energy and laid back everything at the warehouse was, I started to view it as my escape, my blessing even. I never had to shave until I wanted to, I didn't have to worry about what I wore or said, and I had money to get my life back on track bit by bit.

I suppose it should have bothered me more. I say everyone knew my name, and they did, but we rarely had reason to call each other by name, and so seldom did so. I started forgetting details about my old life and the outside world, to the point that a lot of my depression and resentment was starting to fade away. My anger and spite diffused into a simple bitterness, and even that faded with time. I remember letting go of one of the few personalizations I had to my outfit--a small silver necklace with a single angel wing on it. Not much, sure, but I had always worn it even after my bad breakup because, for some reason, I felt like it had completed my image. Like the silver hanging off me gave just the right tinge of color to make 'grung-ey laid-off depressed bastard' look okay. But I wasn't exactly showing off to anyone, and I eventually forgot the reason I'd broken up with my ex, or even gotten together with her to begin with, so it was easy to just ditch it one day and toss it in a bin when it got tangled in my coat. I eventually forgot my ex's name. And then my friends' names, and then my mother's name. I think I might've even forgotten my own name, if I had stayed there long enough. And for some reason I don't feel very upset by that idea.

It wasn't necessarily apathy. Maybe equal parts apathy and contentment. I remember that the longer I stayed there, the less intimidatingly tall everyone else seemed. The moments where I wore the all-black uniform and cap started to feel more secure, more like a home, than the times I wasn't. Trudging in from the rainy outside with mud clinging to my boots and not being able to tell my tracks from anyone else's that had walked through...that felt okay, felt right.

But, I did eventually want to leave. I think what woke me up was realizing that I had finally paid off my college debts. Since I'd been making ends meet by sleeping in my car and charging my laptop at the warehouse, I was able to devote the biggest portion of my paychecks to the debt, and eventually whittled it down to nothing. All in just a year. With that, I could finally start saving up properly...and it bothered me, just a bit, that I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my money. Oh, I could name amenities I wanted, trivial and superfluous things. I would have so much extra now, even after food and gas. I could get a place to rent again...but did I really want to? I remember wondering if my cash would impress a girl, and realizing I didn't much want a girlfriend anymore. I wondered to myself if I missed my old friends, and found I didn't. I had friends here, or at least, I thought I did. Was I friends with my coworkers? I hesitantly decided I was. So, if I had friends, I could now use some of my extra money to treat them to drinks.

I selected a few faces I saw regularly and a few names I still remembered, and offered them to go drinking with me at the end of our shift. It was pointed out to me that, at 6 am, nothing would be offering alcohol except the convenience stores. I fumbled a bit over that, and then simply invited them to go with me tomorrow, before our next one. So me and about six other men headed into a populated bar at 7 pm.

It was still too early for the crowds full of party-ers to go in, but the club lights and music were on. We must've looked a sight, seven ominously tall men in coats, gloves, caps, and boots all strolling in at once. I remember vaguely wondering why none of us had showed up in normal clothes, then deciding that I didn't care. Walking in made me uneasy, though. I looked around at everyone, and no one would meet my gaze, most especially not anyone who'd been staring until realizing they were caught. Something wasn't right. The noise of chatter, the movement of their bodies. I felt very different from these people. The idea of being in a bar like this, I was having second thoughts about it. For a minute, I wondered if I was worried about any of my old friends seeing me here and wanting to meet up, but then I quickly decided that this was unlikely and hardly bothered me at all. No, I think it was something fundamental about the people there. The shape of them, the color of them... They seemed to sag and sway. They were too fluid, too...fleshy? They seemed misshapen and loud and strangely inhuman, and when I looked back at the crowd of men with me, I felt my normalcy restored.

I did have a good time, though. We took up a table to ourselves, and ordered a few different foods and drinks on me. Some removed gloves, and one of them removed a scarf I hadn't realized he'd been wearing. Some hesitantly took their caps off and fidgeted with them in their hands, but eventually relaxed. I remember spotting little details like eye colors, and voice textures, and facial hair and ear piercings and...and smiles. That was so weird. Did we smile? Did we smile the right way? How long had I been unbothered by not smiling?

But I liked it. We had the right shape, the right line and color and stiffness and moderate cheer. I liked it a lot. It was more familiar and personal than our usual interactions, but still safe. We talked more as we drank and ate, and I would hear personal stories. At one point, we started sharing how long we'd been working at the warehouse; some could name the exact date they'd started, but most couldn't remember, only that it had been years, and they smiled about that, and affectionately called me the newbie. And I realized that I was hearing my name again. 'Brennan'. I felt oddly disconnected from that name. Hearing it once would've made me perk, but so often in a conversation...was that strange? Did people usually refer to someone openly that much? Friends did that, I thought, and I realized with a warmth that these people _were_ my friends, somehow. My name, though, that little nugget of confusion stuck with me. I was Brennan...Brennan Torres. Why did that name feel like it was far away, somehow? Was it still linked in my mind to the old me, that I no longer knew?

I think that was what did it, honestly. I wouldn't have minded never hearing my name again, honestly, but I still wanted to. We finished up that evening and went directly back to our shifts, our alcohol intakes not bothering us in the least bit, and I was thinking things over. I think that eventually contributed to me leaving. Not necessarily dissatisfaction, but knowing how unfamiliar with the outside world I'd become. I didn't necessarily want to go rekindle things with an ex, or reignite old relationships with my prior friends and family. I just really wanted to go find new things. Seeing my friends, with a cap off or a glove discarded, eyes twinkling here and there or a tooth gleaming under club neon, it made me want more. More of that pleasant, but not radical way of peeling things back. The boxes I handled, I suddenly wanted to know their contents, real bad.

When I announced I was leaving, there was warmth. The warehouse seemed colder than ever, as if trying to convince me to stay, but my coworkers...they all hugged me tight and wished me well, even though I couldn't remember their names. Their smiles were out of practice and stiff, but genuine. I told them I wanted to go back to college, now I could afford it. So many hands gripped my shoulders, so many arms would wrap around my neck. Stubble scratching against my cheek, cold ears against mine. I asked my manager if I needed to turn in the uniform, but she told me to keep it, in case I ever wanted to come back.

I'm much happier now than I used to be, much more content. I have my college degree now, and a place to stay. I haven't contacted any of my old friends or my parents, can't remember their names, can't imagine what we'd talk about. I've got new friends who get me, though. As for the warehouse, I might even go back. I just kind of want to see how they're doing, and if the details of them are still there under those coats and caps. The uniform, I still have it, and it calls to me, wanting me to wear it again. This outside world, it's got its nice parts. But it would also be nice to shed it, and put on a new, much thicker skin and let it all fade again. Human clothes, human skin...fun to wear. Human emotions, even moreso, though occasionally unpleasant.

Does that make sense? Wanting to scrub 'Brennan' away for a bit and be an unknown?

_Statement ends._


	24. Veil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Jack Fox, regarding a stolen hoodie. Original statement given March 8th, 2004. 
> 
> Statement begins.

My friend died a few years ago, and left me cursed.

Jay Fox wasn't his real name, and Jack Fox isn't mine, but it's how we called each other when we were criminals. We were thieves, and we liked to think that we made theft and swindling into an art. Jay was just a little bit better at it than me. He pulled off super daring thefts, and he never, ever got caught even once. The things he did in broad daylight, it almost made you think he was invisible, nevermind everything he did under cover of darkness. Compared to him, I wasn't as bold, and I occasionally needed him to bail me out of trouble. Whatever you want to think of us, and we did make a practice of some shady things, we never killed anyone.

The dying and recently deceased were fair game, though, I should say. Despicable, some would say, but it worked. It was why Jay was willing to hang out in awful neighborhoods with high crime rates even though he only ever had a small switchblade on him at the most cautious of times. Any place not blessed enough for credit cards to be ubiquitous, and especially where gangs often got into fights. The criminal world is as dangerous as it is because it's full of opportunists and cowards, and I count us among that--most often when there's a fight that ends up with someone dead, most of the perps will panic and flee the scene, knowing police will catch them if they hang around. That was Jay's favorite time to act. If he was around, he'd slip in and rob the body or the poor bleeding schmuck and make off with any cash he could lift off him. Occasionally, a thug would still be hanging around, but somehow it never ended badly for Jay even when he stumbled on a thug who'd decided he was willing to stoop to robbing his victim himself. Worst came to worst, Jay would leave after robbing two banged-up people instead of one, and having left a perp unconscious for the police to catch. Win win.

If ever a situation looked like it could get us a lot of money, but was too dangerous to risk it, we worked together. We'd spot a likely hideout for crooks with cash, and Jay would go out and bust a few car windows and set off the alarms, sending the rats scurrying to check who was messing with their ride. While they were doing that, I'd slip in through a window and make off with whatever loose cash was in the place. It wasn't just playing cat and mouse with men on the street, either. Anytime someone looked their most helpless, we'd step in and swipe, and be gone before anyone could catch us. Poor little old lady just got knocked out in a car crash? How bad was she crunched, and could her purse be reached from a window?

And throughout it all, Jay was flawless. Never a smudge, never a stutter, never a scratch. He was an excellent thief. So, you have to understand how weird it was for him to just drop dead out of the blue one day.

The incident report was gang violence, naturally, but I heard that he was given a closed-casket funeral. Surely I'd have heard from him, if he was ever in a pinch so bad that someone might bust him up that badly? It was a real shock to me, because we were each other's best friend. Closer than actual brothers, him and I, and I couldn't imagine him just being dead out of nowhere, leaving me alone. But really, the only thing more surprising than him devastating me like that was him leaving me something in his will.

I say we were close, but our families didn't know that. While my reputation wasn't necessarily shining, neither of our circles ever caught onto what huge thieves we were, nor do I imagine they ever realized we were partners in crime instead of high school friends who just hung out a lot. It's difficult to describe. We were each other's best friend, yes, but we still had lives outside of the other that didn't tend to intersect. To me, Jay was the sort of dude who had my back every day and would give me the last of the spare change he had so I could get a cigarette or a snack. To his family, I was probably just another friend of his they didn't see often, so I understand their bizarre and somewhat irritated looks when I arrived in their living room because the executor of Jay's will, whenever the hell he wrote that down, had given me a call.

It turns out that Jay had left me his black hoodie with the white drawstrings. I recognized it immediately with a pang, because that _was_ Jay. He'd worn that thing every day that I'd ever seen him, to the point part of me had been sure it was a part of his body. He was very attached to it. The executor told me that this, his favorite hoodie and a highly sentimental item, was gifted to me specifically, and what's more, there were instructions.

"Always keep change in the pockets. Always wear it when the sun goes down until you're home, so you don't catch cold."

Catch cold? 'Sentimental' had been the right of it. The words had felt a little too pleasant and protective to really be Jay, but I didn't question them, and instead thanked him, and the executor, and his family while giving the latter my condolences. And I left with it, waiting until I was home to put it on so I didn't seem insensitive. I wanted to cry. It carried his scent, so much so that it felt like another day where he was right there beside me and he was sighing that I hadn't brought a coat and was letting me take his. I checked the pockets, and found some things, things I almost wanted to go back and tell the executor he had missed.

The first was his switchblade. How the hell had that gone under the radar? His family would've had a breakdown if they'd thought their angel had been carrying knives. Had he meant for me to have this? But in the other pocket was, not just a single fifty pence coin, but a note attached to that as well.

"Wear this to hide from them. Pay your nightly dues. Don't get caught broke."

Honestly, what kind of cryptic bullshit was that? Mostly I was just confused, but part of me started to get a little nervous. We were good, but we had crossed innumerable people in our days as thieves. Was it possible that someone had been after Jay, and now was after me, too? I couldn't really talk to anyone about what my concerns were, not without implicating both him and myself. I figured keeping change in the pockets, for whatever weird reason, was a simple enough instruction to follow, so I put it out of my mind for a while as best I could.

And, after that, is when the nightly disturbances began.

Despite what my story so far would suggest, I've never had a lot of reason to be attacked during the night. I sleep relatively comfortably, and I'm not used to being woken up at night. The first time it happened, I was groggy and confused, wondering what exactly had gotten me up, when I heard my door creak closed. I bolted upright, reaching for jay's switchblade that I kept on a stand on my bedside table, pointing it outward, but my room was empty. I got out of bed and turned on the lamp, and there was nothing out of the ordinary. Grabbing Jay's hoodie and putting it on, I peeked out into the hallway and toured the rest of my flat with a flashlight, jumping at any slight noise. I couldn't shake the feeling that there were people in or around my place, and when I circled the outside in the bitter cold, I thought the wind sounded like people moving through the woods behind my flat. I eventually went back to bed with my door locked and my hoodie discarded, and I should've noticed then that the change was missing from the pockets. It took my stupid arse 'til the next morning to realize.

But from then on, I could see them. The ones in the dark. Whenever I was out late, or even just awake past sunset, I could see them if I looked. Out in the woods, in the alleyways, in the distance behind buildings. The shadowy figures, with their bright eyes peering out of the darkness directly at me. The later it gets, the more of them I can see. The deeper into the night the clock goes, the closer to me they wander. The sight of their eyes, it terrifies me...

I...I'm sorry, I didn't explain that well. But ever since the first visit, I've been aware of the lurkers. They're constantly watching me from the places where the light doesn't reach, and like I did, you'll quickly understand what 'nightly dues' meant. I usually ended up with change in my pocket at the end of any given day anyway, but I was constantly aware of them from then on. The very next night, I was visited again, as I have been every night since, and this time I woke up before it was gone. The thing that crept into my room, even though the door and the window had both been locked. I sat there, paralyzed with fear, as it passed by my bed and went for the hoodie hanging on the coat stand and rummaged through the pockets, taking the spare change. And then left, allowing me peace for the rest of the night.

Well, after that, I had a pretty good incentive to keep stealing, didn't I? I didn't know if there was ever a given amount they'd settle for, but they always took what they could find in the hoodie's pockets, always between midnight and three a.m. I think they hesitated if I was indoors, to be honest, because they'll start drawing closer in the nighttime as early as ten and eleven. I'd stay paralyzed in bed, my switchblade clutched close, but too terrified to try aggravating them. Obviously, the police weren't going to help with this problem, and I wasn't willing to drag my family and what remaining friends I had into it, so I was mostly in this by myself. And i was always desperately assured that as long as I kept up my cash, I wouldn't get taken by them. I wouldn't go the way Jay had gone.

I think the hoodie is a magnet for them, to be honest, but I didn't dare get rid of it. It's me they'll hurt if the dues aren't paid, the hoodie is just the delivery method for them. And, unfortunately, I've recently found out that it probably functioned as a cloak, too.

See, it only took one slip-up. I had had a hard day of it, spent the last of my cash, and I needed to steal more. But nothing was coming for me to swoop down on, and eventually, when I could see their eyes peering at me as the shadows lengthened, I decided I've have to risk holding up some people. The first couple robberies went well, but I needed more, or I'd be in the same position the next night. Eventually, I tried holding up the wrong guy, and...well, I got the crap beaten out of me, and I got robbed in turn. I was never good at proper fights, and the switchblade was lifted off me a little too easily. I'm lucky I didn't get stabbed with it. So then, all I had was a hoodie, and midnight was coming. They were stalking too close now, a mere fifty yards by the time I was able to get up all black and blue. All I could do was scurry home, toss the hoodie off in the living room, lock all the doors, and barricade myself in my room.

And it was a good thing I did, too. They got in, and they didn't like that I didn't have my pocket change. I kept my lamp on, and that kept them at bay for a little while, but I could still hear them scurrying, breathing outside, getting ready to try the door, and when they found it locked, they got aggressive. They clawed and banged at the door, and the glass of my window pane broke behind the dresser I'd shoved in front of it. And that was how it went, all night. At some point they must have left, probably just before sunrise, but I didn't feel safe enough to unblock anything until about eleven a.m.

I'd made it, but they'd be back that night. Maybe my lack of sleep was affecting me, but I thought I could see them during the day now, too, in dark corners and underneath cars. I robbed a convenience store that day and went home with enough cash to placate them. I didn't stop wearing it, because I felt naked and exposed without it. It felt like they creeped up on me faster during the dusk hours if I had it off. I never kept the hoodie in my room when I slept, though. And I was able to keep that up for a year and a half.

I don't know how Jay managed it, all that time he was my friend and stealing with me. He never had one broke day, somehow, up until that fateful slip-up. Here I was, not lasting even two years. And you know why I'm here now. You can tell by the fact I'm sitting here in front of you, not wearing it, that I don't have the hoodie anymore.

I got mugged. It was stolen.

Without it, they come so much faster, invade my home so much easier. They won't take loose change from anything else, either. And without the hoodie, I'm...I'm vulnerable. It isn't like that first night, where I could keep the lamp on. The light keeps them at bay, I know that now, but now its bulbs die in the span of about twenty minutes. That fire in the flat, a couple months ago, that burned down half the apartment complex? That was me. My lamp started to fail while they were clawing at my door, and I could see them seeping under it whenever the light dimmed. I turned on my ceiling light so that I could still keep them away when the lamp failed a minute later, but it only lasted a half hour. I knew I wouldn't make it through the night like this, so I got my lighter, and just lit the place up. They hate the light and heat, so I lit a fire. Explains the way I look now, doesn't it?

Since then, I've been raiding stores for lamps and bulbs and camping in flat after flat. I keep at least three lamps on in my room at night, which is always barricaded. One is kept on until its power starts to die, and then I turn on another and swap out the first one's bulb. That was enough at first. Lately, I've been seeing this inky, black liquid seeping under my door when they get frustrated. It's so dark and smooth it seems like the world is melting away, it made me panic. I've started stuffing towels and sheets under the door to block it off. And it goes like that, throughout the entire night. And that's how it's gone, for weeks now.

But I'm known, now. I'm on several stores' camera feeds. I've been hopping from city to city, but I'm not going to last. Eventually, the cops are going to catch up to me, and arrest me. And if they get me...if they stick me in a jail cell, where I can't control the light...this little lighter won't sustain me, if I'm even allowed to keep it.

Goddamn it, I need to find that hoodie! Where the fuck is the guy that stole it from me?!

_Statement ends._


	25. Phoenix

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Anabella Koch, regarding a house fire. Original Statement given August 9th, 2015.
> 
> Statement begins.

When I was a little girl, my home burned down.

I was seven in 1991, living in Germany at the time, and had been playing at my friend's house across the street. When we were out in the yard, I noticed a man hanging around our house, but thought nothing of it. I had gone inside to help my friend and her mother bake a cake by the time the fire was big enough to notice. I remember running across the street and being held back by my friend's mother, screaming for Mama and Papa and Oma, until the firefighters arrived, way too late to do anything about the blaze that was already smoldering itself out. My mother, father, and grandmother, along with our pet rabbit, had been burned to death, apparently so badly that not enough of their ashes could be sifted from the ruins to fill an urn.

I lost everything that day, and was sent to live with a distant aunt and uncle. Not that there was anyone else to take me, but to be honest, that was probably for the best.

I lived out my life in a far-away county with those memories haunting me. Life returned to normal, as it faded into an old trauma past which I could get my schooling done. I was seventeen before I thought again of my old home, and thought that maybe I should try and go see it. My aunt and uncle, obviously, were very against that, but they would have been even if the circumstances were typical of that situation, which at the time I still thought they were. But it had been ten years, and the anniversary of the fire was coming up. I felt like I owed it to my parents and Oma to go back there and see them one more time. I pressured them until they were finally willing to drive me down to my old neighborhood.

You can't imagine how confused I was. I expected to see a new house where my old one had once stood, perhaps with some other family now enjoying their daily lives there. At worst, I expected a conspicuous space between houses taken up by a demolished vacant lot. What I saw instead was the entire neighborhood deserted. Every house was boarded up, and a sign posted in front of every last one of them read "Danger: Keep Out". A sign that welcomed people into the neighborhood, which was previously a bustling gated community, had been covered with a board that read "Do Not Enter". I remember how cloudy and gray and depressing everything was, from the sky right down to the colorless grass. I asked my aunt and uncle what was going on and why everything was like this. They said they didn't know. Well, my aunt probably didn't. But even back then, I could tell something was off with my uncle's answer. It was in his voice, he knew something.

We found the ruins of my house, looking at the same time as though it had been burned down only yesterday and as if it had remained untouched for centuries. I was allowed to get out, but told not to get too close. I stayed across the street and said words I'd rehearsed, but if Mama and Papa and Oma could hear me, I didn't feel like it. The air felt stagnant and heavy. It was ridiculous to think that ash could still be hanging in the air, even now, but for some reason I felt like it was. It was the kind of air to cling. Then I got back in the car, and my aunt told me how good I'd done while my uncle drove out as fast as he could without causing a panic.

My curiosity was stoked, then. Not that I really wanted to know more about what happened to me when I was a child, but I just wasn't able to shake it, you know? Every time I thought about that whole neighborhood being abandoned. For some reason, I felt myself imagining that man I had seen on that day. Don't know why he popped up in my head, but he did. I wondered where he was, if he knew how close to death he'd been.

By the time I finished school, I couldn't contain myself anymore, especially without the load of schoolwork to keep my mind off of things. My uncle definitely knew something. But whenever I would ask him about it, he'd lie and say he didn't know anything more than I did, and that there wasn't anything to the story anyway, residential areas just sometimes fell into decline like that. I wasn't swayed.

By the time I was an adult and moved out, I had the money to begin looking into this myself. You wouldn't think that the sort of thing that causes an entire neighborhood to be condemned would be difficult to find, but there was nothing, and I mean _nothing_. No newspaper clippings, no online archives, nothing in the police database at all! Even if there was truly nothing out of the ordinary going on, you would think that the place would've been an intensely popular site for ghost hunters and Halloween tours, but no--the local county officers told me they had strict instructions to keep people out of there that persisted to this day, but they couldn't tell me _why_. I don't think they were hiding it, I think they just genuinely didn't know. Which, I suppose, I should've expected. Without a criminal offense attached, I couldn't expect details like that to persist a decade later.

And after that struck me, it also struck me that I didn't actually know what had caused the fire I was investigating. Surely _that's_ documented, right? It had to be. It was actually bothering me now that, as long as I'd lived with this memory, I didn't know how it had happened. You'd think that would've been one of the first things seven-year-old me asked my new guardians when they first allowed me to broach the subject. Naturally, I pursued that line of questioning too, but they didn't have anything for me. Finally, an officer told me, quite irritably, that if I wanted to get anywhere with my amateur detective work, I might do better over at the fire department. Which, I suppose, was kind of a good point.

So, over to the fire department I went. To my great disappointment, though, none of the firefighters who were there at the time had been on the force for more than five years. The senior officer in charge of the place was able to tell me that the fire department here had built a reputation as being cursed, as a lot of the old members had started getting sick and dying within a year or two of each other. I immediately wanted to hear more, and the man told me that only one of the old crew was still alive today, and gave me directions on where to find him.

His name was Hertz, and it turned out he was in the hospital, the intensive care unit, as it happened, with late-stage cancer. Only friends and family permitted, naturally, but at this point, I was getting wise to my barriers. I'd snuck into the fire station before coming there, so I could steal an old badge no one would miss, and flash it to prove that I knew Hertz. I know, I know, that's awful, but it's how badly I wanted to know. And I got in, and he looked like death, man. Picture every cancer patient you've ever seen from a dramatic hospital tv show, and that's him. It was immediately apparent that chemo therapy wasn't going to fix this. I had seen a picture of Hertz on the wall of the fire department, and this couldn't be more different from the healthy, strong, rosy-cheeked man I'd seen. But he was awake, and aware, and he could speak. So I introduced myself.

As soon as I told him that I was the daughter of the people killed in the fire at the Sunshine Meadows housing community ten years ago, his eyes widened. He told me everything I needed to know.

He told me that the community had been evacuated, condemned, and shut down because it was irradiated. I got this blank look on my face, and I just stared before asking him what the hell that meant. He meant radiation, like those left behind after nuclear tests or atomic bombs being set off. When I asked him why on Earth this wouldn't be public knowledge, he laughed. A nation's government keeps no bigger secrets than what's going on with its weapons, and since the United Kingdom had gotten word of an irradiated house fire, but didn't know how it had happened, they'd hushed it all up and shut the place down. Hertz was all the proof I needed to know he was telling the truth, even before he confirmed that every member of the old fire team that had participated in going inside the ruined house to check for survivors had gotten ill and contracted cancers that killed them a few years later. No newspapers were ever going to print about it because the first person to leak something like this would've been shot faster than you could say 'dumb decisions'.

But how did it happen, I wanted to know. How does a house just go up in flames, and how does it get so badly irradiated that a whole housing community is shut down and wiped from the records? Hertz couldn't tell me that. They were never able to discern the source of the fire, which had started in the living room, but otherwise apparently triggered out of thin air. For lack of a better explanation, the fire department had simply written it off as an electrical fire.

I thanked him for his information, and wished him a pleasant recovery, and he laughed and told me to wish him an easy death instead.

Well, after that, I knew what I was looking for. It was a good thing I hadn't gotten too close to the ruins of my old house, as otherwise I might not've made it this far. I got wind of another house fire only a few months later, and you better believe I was all over that and then some. I spent the next nine years of my life hunting down information on house fires. It hasn't been easy. I've had to worm my way into security and secretary jobs, slowly working my way up into government positions and platforms, so I had clearance to look for things without getting a bullet in the back of my head, doing far worse things than sneaking into buildings and stealing badges.

What I've discovered, I think, might surprise you.

April 1996 marked the tenth such fire in ten years. April 2006 marked the twentieth. The only problem was, almost all of them happened in different countries. The incidents were subject to such confusion and secrecy that the fact that they all happened hundreds of miles away from each other meant they were never connected. And that's the ones I know about--a lot of them are just seemingly-random fires that have caused who knows how many cancer-related deaths because no one ever realized the sites were irradiated. I've spent ages digging this up, because in a lot of cases, the fires never killed anyone, making them even less documented.

And you have no idea how difficult it was to find out who was responsible. The witness testimony never added up to much, especially when there weren't that many to begin with. Only in the cases where the police did their damn jobs interviewing people around the sites on the incidents that were actually deemed important did information get stored that made its way back to me, speaking of a tall, blond man that had been seen hanging around the site a few minutes before it went up, but was nowhere to be found once the fire had been started.

And if the fire department doesn't suspect arson, and they won't if they can't find any trace of an accelerant or a motive, then no one has any reason to go looking for a nameless, faceless blond man who might not have anything at all to do with it, do they?

But I was sure he was responsible. I started calling him 'the Phoenix' in my files, since he'd start a huge fire, and then vanish, only to pop back up again and start another one. Though the descriptions of this guy were always vague at best, when I managed to interview some previous witnesses, I did note the fact that he was always described as relatively young. He'd been active for at least twenty years by the time I started searching for him, and he had to have been an adult before that. Who was he?

Well, I eventually found out. That's right, I met up with this guy, I contacted him. And, as far as I know, I killed him.

I knew where to find him, as it happens. See, I'd been marking his path through Europe via the fires I thought he started. See here, I brought it with me, take a look. See? He's been all over Europe, starting plenty of fires outside the cycle--including the one They all converge on a single point: Ukraine.

Specifically, in Pripyat, at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The fires spread outward from that site until fire #5 halfway through the ten-year cycle, then start winding back in, rinse and repeat. Mine happened to be the fifth in the first chain, see? I've been updating the map as I go, so I knew where to head if I was going to head this guy off and maybe catch him in the act. Just a few months ago, I caught up with him in the Red Forest. Do y'know the Red Forest? It's in Polesia, in the Exclusion Zone. I had to wear heavy protective clothing when I went there, since the whole place is so contaminated. I had caught up with this guy in February, so he hadn't yet started fire #29. I was armed, and followed him until he retreated to what I suspect is his home base in April, which is when I confronted him.

He seemed so surprised to find a hazard-suited woman brandishing a silenced handgun at him. Surprised, but not intimidated. His eyes were very big, very dilated, but his lids were drooping. This 'phoenix', despite the odd look on his face, was definitely not in his thirties, not by appearances. I didn't know what I was dealing with or how it might end for me. But I approached him and demanded answers.

His name was Kazimir Brandt. He called himself a 'student of the great flame'. When I asked him if he was the one starting irradiated fires across Europe, he confirmed that he was, and when I asked him why he'd do it, he told me the burnings were 'offerings'. It was obvious by now I was dealing with some sort of religious nut. I could've shot him then and there, but I had more questions. I asked how it was he chose his arson sites, and why he'd kill innocent people in service to his god. He told me that...it's kind of hard to remember how he phrased it, but I think he told me that it was a matter of handling energy. He usually burned down forests or old delapidated buildings, but on the years he'd built up enough power, he'd send lives screaming into the maw of his god. I told him he'd missed a spot, then, as I was still alive, but he shook his head.

"I left you alive on purpose," he told me.

I was afraid, terrified even, but I asked him why. He, in turn, asked what the point was of wounding the world if it didn't leave a scar. The true Desolation, he told me, was not in the lives taken, but in the lives that remembered. The memory of torment burned into their brains. The physical embodiment of torment burned into the cells of the firefighters who'd gotten caught in his scheme was a bonus, he told me. His god's tongue, he said, swept across the agony left behind his 'projects' and tasted sweet honey. Every arson he'd committed in a populated area, he had always left alive one person.

I asked him one more question, and that was if he had caused the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl. He shook his head. No, he hadn't caused it, but it had spoken to him. I asked if he meant the reactor, and he shook his head, and clarified that the meltdown _itself_ spoke to him. The detonation there, it had called out to him and chosen him and wrapped him in its embrace. Now he was to burn in its favor, making pilgrimages to Chernobyl every ten years to continue building up his god's power.

I'd heard enough, and I shot him through the head.

I saw flame spilling out of the hole in his head even before he hit the ground. His body went limp, but the forest floor where his grey matter had spattered started to smoke. He was bleeding fire, and it was catching on the dead leaves and grass underneath him. I stepped back, and as the fire started to spread, I turned and ran. I looked back over my shoulder, and it seemed almost as though the flame were following me. Snaking down the curves and dips in the ground, pursuing me. I ran faster, and didn't stop until I was well out of the Exclusion Zone.

So, yeah, that fire in the Red Forest a few months ago...that one was on me.

I performed my safety procedures and made sure to decontaminate myself, but as I said, he's only dead as far as I know. There's only eight more months until the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown. I'm waiting. I'm not convinced he's dead, not yet. If he was that easy to kill, the contamination would've done it by now. I can only hope it worked, but if I didn't put him down with that, I'll have to find another way to do it. If he's allowed to continue wreaking havoc...we'd never see the end of the after-effects. I just hope I'm not taken out by cancer before I can do that.

I tripped while I was running from his burning corpse in the Red Forest, you see. I don't know if I was out of the Exclusion Zone when it happened, but...there was a rip in my hazard suit at the knee.

_Statement ends._


	26. The Babysitter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for: child death, discussed child predation.
> 
> Statement of Kaleigh Quinn, regarding an individual suspected of predation. Original statement given October 29th, 2017.
> 
> Statement begins.

Sitters are critical in this day and age.

There's millions of people out there who had kids and didn't realize how hard it would be to balance a child and a job that now has to pay for that child. Babysitters tend to work for far less than minimum wage, at hours equal to or greater than that of a part-time service job. And they have to--if these people had jobs that paid enough to trickle down some fair cash to the sitter, they wouldn't be asking around on Facebook to get one. So nobody wins. The parents have to find a sitter to watch the kid or they risk losing their jobs and getting into even worse financial positions, and the sitters have to shut up and accept the fact that nobody in their area is able to give them a fair salary.

That creates an environment that's especially dangerous. The hyper-concerned mums on Facebook are right, to an extent--these are people you want watching your kids specifically when you aren't able to. You can't just take any schmuck off the street and allow them in your home, unless you want your child groped and worse. There's tons of people who should never, ever be in contact with children, who know full well that young struggling parents these days are too desperate to be picky with their sparse options.

One of those sitters was Rhyssa.

I remember Rhyssa well. She was the babysitter of my best friend, back when we were kids. I was eleven, and Johnny was ten. Rhyssa was the babysitter who'd been settled on by Johnny's parents, who worked a lot and weren't able to watch him every day during the summer. I remember that she was bigger than me, but still short, and she loved the color green, she wore it all the time. She wore jeweled earrings and a necklace, and spectacles that made her eyes look all big. She always kept this shiny pen behind her ear that she'd loan to a kid if he needed something to do homework with. Even though she looked kind of odd, she was still turning the heads of kids who were somewhat older and goggling at her lovely shape and shiny hair and cute face. Johnny was a late bloomer, so he didn't get the deal with how pretty Rhyssa was. Now that I know better, I know how very intentional it was on her part to be so pretty and nonthreatening.

She seemed so cool. She was great with kids, would help them with school work, let them watch television, would bring them snacks from her other job, and if she ever got word of a bully harassing her charge, ooh, would she have something to say about it. She was like a second mom, honestly, and for me, whose parents were home but weren't really that attentive to me, I remember wishing she could've been _my_ mom. Or at least my older sister.

Johnny certainly loved her. His own parents loved him dearly, but they just couldn't be around often enough, but in his mind, he'd gotten the best deal possible. She was the guardian he just didn't have otherwise, who went out of her way to make him happy. I remember that she taught him how to pick locks, and he taught me how to do it, too.

It was a critical skill for him to have, the way she wanted things to go.

See, over the course of the few weeks Rhyssa was sitting him, Johnny started to get very sick. His parents, who were able to come home in the evenings, didn't worry too much initially, as they just thought it was a cold. But somehow, I never caught that cold, even though I played with Johnny every day. It got worse and worse, little by little, until Rhyssa was finally forced to abandon her sitting duties, with a heartfelt apology to Johnny's parents about how she'd caught the illness and didn't want to re-infect little Johnny. Well, that put Johnny's parents in a very bad position indeed. They were forced to take time off from work to watch Johnny, but they still didn't think ill of poor Rhyssa. Besides, with Johnny so ill, they rightfully felt a duty to come home and watch him themselves, at least until he was better.

I had noticed it, too. Johnny just didn't have as much energy as he'd used to when we played, and I remember him being a very energetic kid. He was starting to look pale, and he was sneezing a lot. He was always saying that his stomach was hurting, and his energy was dropping by the day in that last week. I was an astute kid, and I knew this was getting bad and that he needed to see a doctor. I thought it was obvious that he should be at the hospital, but somehow his parents never seemed to think it was that much of a threat. A little soup, a little bedrest, you'll be all better, little J. Mummy and Daddy will be in their bedroom if you get hungry or thirsty during the night, okay?

Johnny and I had walkie-talkies we'd use to communicate with each other, and occasionally we'd use them if we wanted to stay up late and chat without our parents knowing. It was about eleven p.m., and Johnny was being slow to respond. My parents had better cable than his, so on this night in particular, I was watching a late-night wrestling show and transcribing it for him over the radio. He was so slow to respond, and he barely talked, sounding all groggy and raspy when he did, and I told him a few times that if he wanted to go to bed, I could leave him be. But he insisted that he was fine wanted to hear all about it. So I kept watching for him, until I finally asked him a question, and in response I heard a gurgle, followed by this weird crackling noise. This sort of clicking, intermittent crackle, that I mistook for radio static, because that happened a lot. But I was still worried.

I could go and check on him, couldn't I? Maybe bring him some snacks, or something. His house was just across the street, my parents would never realize I was gone. So I grabbed a few granola bars and bags of chips from under my bed, and I left out my window and went over to his house. The windows were all dark; did his parents go to sleep early? I was at the door when I saw a shadow pass the front porch light through the window. I ducked down, eager not to get caught. It was moving towards the right, where his parents' bedroom was, so that was probably his dad going to bed. I needed to be quiet. Once I was convinced that it was safe, I picked the lock on the front door and went in, heading towards the left where Johnny's room was. The door creaked when I opened it, and I saw him curled up on his bed, facing me, in the light from his television. I didn't realize the color of his skin was off in the white-gray-blue light. I approached him, seeing his eyes half-lidded, and wondering if he was awake and if I should shake him. I went up to him with the snacks in my pockets, and reached out to touch his shoulder. I could tell that something was off, but none of it clicked until, when I touched him, his skin depressed inward, and flaked away.

My hand jerked back, and I walked around the bed, and saw that Johnny was gone. There was nothing left of him except a husk. It was hollowed out, with a huge tear in the back, opened up from the inside.

I heard a creak from down the hall, and, already terrified, I opened his window and jumped out, injuring my ankle, but still sprinting back to my house and climbing back through my own window. I ran inside, locked it, locked my door, drew the blinds, and buried myself under my blankets, too scared to sleep. It was sunrise, and then it was noon, and my parents finally got up to check on me in my room. They got onto me for locking my door, which I wasn't supposed to do, and for obviously having stayed up way later than I was supposed to. All I could do was babble to them about how something had happened to Johnny, Johnny was dead, someone had killed him...

My parents told me that was nonsense. Johnny had been taken on a trip with his parents. I gawped at them--how could they think that? And they pointed out to me that they'd seen the car leaving last night, and that Rhyssa had mentioned that his parents had told her they were taking him out of town for some fresh air. I just stood there in silence. That...that was crazy talk. But now that I thought about it...I hadn't seen his parents car that night. But I knew I had seen what happened to Johnny, and it was in that moment that I started to suspect Rhyssa. But I demanded my parents come with me, see what was going on, see inside the house. I dragged them across the street, ignoring their scandalized faces when they saw me picking the lock like it was the easiest thing in the world, and took them inside. I tried to show them Johnny's room, but they got fed up and dragged me out, and said that was enough, and that they'd be taking me to see a therapist, because I was obviously disturbed.

And they did. Another way for them to safely ignore me, to send me to a therapist's office for hours at a time, for weeks, until I finally stopped repeating my crazy story about how Johnny was dead and had been eaten by aliens or something. But I wanted to know about Rhyssa. When I was finally home one day, I snuck onto my parents' computer and got on MySpace, and checked out Rhyssa's page.

She was dead. Or at least, that was what the re-done page said. Apparently she'd been dead for a few days, struggling with the illness she'd contracted until it finally killed her. I just couldn't believe it. Could she really not have had anything to do with this?

But Johnny and his parents didn't return from their 'trip'. My parents ended up telling me they probably moved away. From what I heard, no one who ever went to that house discovered anything out of the ordinary, like blood, or slime, or hollowed-out skins of kids. And eventually, I told myself that maybe I _had_ gone crazy. Maybe this had all been a nightmare and I was coming to terms with my best friend moving away out of the blue. Absolute nonsense, I know.

At least, it was, until recently. As an adult, I use Facebook now, and when I saw some parents that lived in my neighborhood asking around for a babysitter, and saw that name in the comments volunteering her time, just as soon as she was done sitting this one kid whose parents were on a business trip...

She looked exactly the same, like she hadn't aged a day, or changed her fashion sense at all. Her name was spelled the same way. I think she even used the same diction and online speaking style.

I hunted her down. I couldn't get a gun, so I borrowed a friend's hunting knife. I had no idea what I was up against, but I figured, if I could just stop her... I found the house she was staying at, and I caught her just as she was trying to drive the parents' hotwired car out of the driveway. I held her up, and as soon as I was sure she was the same woman--same earrings, same spectacles, same pen slid behind her ear...I shivved her. I reached through the window and got the blade past her arms and into her neck, and she crunched, it was awful. The metal was pushing through an exoskeleton-like frame, and ugly juices were running out... But almost as soon as I did that, I heard a scream. I rushed inside the house, but I didn't know where to find the kid...by the time I got to the right bedroom, I was too late. More screaming, and I rushed down the hall and kicked open the door...

It was in the middle of feasting on the kid's parents. They were already dying. It was horrible, a four-foot-tall insectoid thing, with legs and wings and these big, horrible eyes, and these hideous moving mouthparts.... I knew my knife wasn't going to be enough. It escaped out the window, and I tried to follow, got out into the hotwired car and tried to see where it would go, but it flew off into the woods, and I lost it.

It took me a long moment of realizing I had failed before I made the decision to burn the house down. I didn't like doing it, but it was the only option. If the police actually got wind of this, they'd never believe the real story, even with the evidence right in front of their eyes. And if the more fantastical parts of the crime scene leaked out, Rhyssa would go underground again and never resurface. So I had no option but to cover her tracks for her.

I kept an eye on her Facebook page this time. It went silent for a good long while--years, in fact. But just recently, she popped back up. I noted how she looked a tiny bit younger in her latest selfies, and her listed age had gone down. But she was still offering a babysitting service, only a couple counties away. The instant I saw someone accept her as a sitter, I did my digging on them and staked out their house. I knew she'd take the first moment alone with the kid to infect them with her little 'illness'. It's how she propagates herself, like one of those parasitic wasps. That was why she was so protective of the kids she was in charge of, always making sure they were fed and not harmed, because she was protecting the young she'd injected into them. That was why they got sicker and weaker, because it was eating them alive from the inside. And the parents would be the young monster's first meal once it burst out of its husk. Eventually, I caught up with her just as she was due to take on her first day on the job.

The minute the parents left, I picked the lock on the door, and burst in, just as she was standing behind the kid while he did his homework, and removing that shiny pen from behind her ear, where it connected by a long, thin, slimy filament...she was about to press it into the flesh of his back.

I knifed her, and she screamed, this hideous, horrible insectoid shriek. I kept stabbing, ignoring the kid's terrified crying, until I was sure she was dead. And then...well, I've never been good with kids, and this one was freshly traumatized, but I told him I was a government agent here to save him from an alien. It took him a long time to calm down enough to believe the lie, he was a real young one. I told him to give me his parents' number, and to stick to the story I gave them over the phone, which was that I was a neighbor who had seen Rhyssa leaving with her arms full of bags, and he piped up and said she'd stolen all of the food in the house.

The parents were right furious, but I'd already burned Rhyssa's body in the woods surrounding the park and buried the ashes, then mopped up all the gore by the time they got home, where I introduced myself as the concerned neighbor who was so scandalized by how awful some so-called babysitters could be. They were so, so grateful, and I even made sure to carefully tell them to watch their electronics, because those damn poseurs loved to sell them, don't ya know?

It all blew over. I got her, before she could infest another kid. It's still kind of hard to believe. I still check Facebook and Twitter religiously, wondering if the job was truly finished. But I think it is. 

I still keep in contact with the kid I managed to save. His name is Mikey, and I've sort of stepped in as his babysitter. I'm teaching him how to pick locks, now. Funnily enough, he's got a real fascination with bugs. I keep telling him to try warming up to butterflies instead of wasps. Last time I suggested it, he said he might start looking at _spiders_ next. Just my luck, huh?

_Statement ends._


	27. Donor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Attis Reidd, regarding his Sunday school classes. Original statement fiven May 16th, 2000.
> 
> Statement begins.

I was a victim of organ theft.

It happened while I was on a mission in southern Asia. My team had set up shop in Pakistan, and we were offering food and sick beds for those in need in the name of God's love. It was tiresome, difficult, sweaty, and occasionally boring, but it still felt good. I've always known that donating to others has been my purpose in life. But I have to confess that I was somewhat soured on it after what happened to me. Should've been more careful with the water I drank, I suppose. I don't actually remember that much of the kidnapping and surgery, given that I was drugged for all of it, but when I woke up from a nightmare, I was confused and in pain. And soon after, I left the mission and the country and flew back here.

I suppose having nightmares after an experience like that would be pretty normal, all things considered. They weren't just flashes of being laid on a table with doctors hovering over me, either. I dreamed of seeing blurry images through eyes that weren't mine, and I dreamed of being crushed in the dark, of being squeezed tight in packaged viscera. The strangest thing I dreamed of were the mutants. I would see people in my dreams, with odd faces and tumor-like growths in their bodies. They'd grow more and more distorted the more I dreamed of them.

But as I say, I didn't think of any of that as strange, at least not until the next bizarre thing happened. Of all of the stories of organ theft victims that are actually real and not completely made-up bullshit, I'm going to guess that most of them don't get the missing kidney back.

There was me, achy and sour while recovering and vowing never to fly out of the country again, when there comes a knock on my door. I remember it waking me up from seeing the particularly flat, bulbous, eye-less face I'd been dreaming of. So, I was grateful, though not exactly presentable. But, I open the door, and there's these two big guys in service uniforms staring down at me. These guys were real big, almost didn't fit in my doorway, and their shirts read 'Breekon and Hope'. They asked me if I was Attis Reidd, and when I confirmed that I was, they held out a clipboard for me to sign. The one in the back was holding onto a box about the size of a small dustbin, which was apparently for me. I tried to tell them that I hadn't ordered anything and wasn't expecting a package, but they talked over me, in these terribly exaggerated accents, and said that it was addressed to me, being returned from an addressee that had gotten it by mistake. Once I had hesitantly, and very confusedly, signed for it, they shoved it at me and left.

Taking the box inside, I opened it like I was unboxing a bomb, and I'm not sure if a bomb would've been preferable. It was a goddamn human heart inside.

The first thing I registered was confusion, because, well...to be honest, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. Most people don't ever actually see human organs, do they? I knew it was moving, and it was sitting in this small tank filled with yellowish-green liquid. At first, with the pulsating, I thought I was looking at some kind of fish. Not at all as red and gory as you'd think. Once I took it out and realized that it was an actual, beating heart, first there was a blank, like my brain just short-circuited, _then_ the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions came.

A heart...some kind of sick prank? A sinister message from the guys who had attacked me? I had no idea what to think. Eventually though, I got over my shock, and hesitantly drew closer. Was it real? I couldn't tell, but I knew that no organ that was being preserved should've been beating like that. When at last I was satisfied that it wasn't going to explode or squirt silly string all over me or just do something else appropriately weird or awful, I checked the tank, and the box it had came in. I found a note written in Punjabi. Once I had I managed to get it translated, I found out that it read "Take it back, please! We don't want it anymore!"

That seemed to settle the case. It was obviously a fake, some sort of battery-powered mechanical pump stuffed inside a rubber heart, and meant to mock my experience. I hadn't had a heart removed from me, and I wondered how the hell anyone would think you could come home and go to the hospital without a heart to begin with. I should just throw it out now, I told myself.

But first, I wanted to get a hold of the guys who had sent me this crap, and that was my mistake. After three straight days of trying to get in contact with 'Breekon and Hope', and finding nothing, that was when I finally realized that the 'heart' had changed.

When I glanced at it out of the corner of my eye, I noticed it was no longer pumping, so I assumed it just ran out of batteries, and whatnot, but then I noticed the shape. It was the wrong shape, very flat and oblong. I did a double take, before I finally took a closer look. I realized it had changed too much to simply be the natural deterioration of a rubber and plastic toy in water. The tubes branching out of it were different. Eventually, I figured out that I was looking at a different organ, and in a moment of uneasy clarity, a quick web search confirmed I was looking at a kidney. I got down on the floor and looked at it closely, and I put my hand over the spot on my midsection where I had stitches sealing me up, and I almost leapt a mile. The kidney had just squirmed in its liquid--and at the same time, I had felt a squirming sensation in my own body, just under my hand.

As you can imagine, I became very scared and upset, and stashed the tank of liquid with its bizarre organ inside out of sight for a few days. But as I slept, my dreams would persist. The 'mutant human' dreams were sloping off, and being replaced by the ones where I squirmed for freedom in a tight cage of warm wetness. When the nightmare woke me up, I'd feel my insides squirming in a solid, single direction, pointing exactly towards where I'd stashed the kidney, like a magnet. I went to the doctor a couple times, and they just told me I was experiencing phantom pains and the usual aches of an amateur surgery stitch-up site, and that after my initial fix-up, there was nothing more they could do for me.

I eventually destroyed the kidney. Took it out of its tank and smashed it with a sledgehammer, and Father God above, it hurt beyond anything you can imagine. It hurt like it was still attached to me, like the sledgehammer was hitting my in the side each time I brought it down. But the pain sloped off and stopped as I hit it again and again, and when it was gone entirely, I knew it was over.

Crises are as like to turn you to prayer as anything else. I was so terrified by all of this that I finally got back on my nightly prayers, which I had abandoned in the wake of my ordeal, as well as my daily readings of the Bible.

While some people claim to hear the voice of God speaking to them and openly giving them direction, the vast majority of them are liars. Those of us in the Christian faith who aren't trying to make money off of saps that way tend to understand the voice of God as something more muted, a voice in your heart offering guidance, often against your self-driven inclinations. I do believe that I've heard that voice on several occasions, and it's why I retain my Christian faith. But never have I heard it so clearly as when I knelt in prayer after destroying that cursed organ.

The voice spoke to me, ringing inside my head, a command that I had heard before many years ago, only magnified a dozen times so that my body seemed to shake with it. It was telling me to give. To donate, to provide help. I pleaded with God to tell me if the ills my body had underwent were a punishment for abandoning my mission, but...well, I suppose I was given an answer. I felt one last squirm in the place where my kidney had once been, stitches straining against flesh inside me, and I heard the voice telling me one last time, louder than ever, to give of myself.

So I knew what I had to do. I was to donate my organs.

I suppose that's a rather more dramatic demand of action than giving out cans of food and bottles of water, but it's better than cutting open your firstborn, isn't it? So, I went out and started looking up transplanting clinics. I found that a burn victim was in need of a skin graft. That seemed the perfect place to begin. So I went down, filled out the paperwork, and I met the woman--name of Noelle Campbell, who had been in a bad explosion--and I got scheduled for an appointment. It was scary, laying down with all of the doctors there and letting them anesthetize me, not knowing for certain what might happen while I was under. I almost had a panic attack as some flashbacks came to me. But they got me laid down, and took a fairly large piece of skin off of my back. I left the clinic with it patched up and I did so in fairly high spirits. Like I said, it feels good to help people.

And, a few days after that, I got a couple of calls.

The first was from the surgeon who had done the skin transplant. There was apparently some mistake, and they'd ended up taking up way more skin than needed, because the woman's skin graft was already done and healed over despite there being plans to perform her graft piece by piece. Since they couldn't very well just slap the leftover skin back on me, they asked if I wanted to litigate for compensation, or if I would be alright letting the extra go to a skin bank until it was needed. I told them the latter was fine and that I'd be more than alright. The second call, however, came from Noelle Campbell.

She had called to thank me for the donation, to tell me what a difference the skin had made, and said that she had been told all about me and my missionary activities. She told me that she had decided to pursue the Christian faith and see what God was all about, and would I mind too terribly showing her to a decent church? I don't think I've ever felt so proud of myself, ever felt such a divine joy. I told her that I'd be happy to help her find God in any way I could.

While this was happening, my dreams continued. They no longer seemed like nightmares, though. I felt myself in bodies that were not my own, places I had never been, and felt my flesh contorting, but I felt joy at the same time. My nightmares of the cramped visceral straight-jacket no longer felt hostile and alien, but comforting. The dreams I had of people with misshapen heads and faces and bodies sloped off...for a time. I knew this was my calling: to give pieces of myself so that others might find life and peace.

Noelle and I kept in contact, and became good friends. We went to the same church and the same classes, and for a while it was as though she had never been burned, the joy radiating off of her was so real. The skin graft was doing wonders for her, honestly, barely noticeable. I was her teacher in the faith, the love of God for man despite his sin. She would even come over to my house, her eyes lidded and dilated with a need to learn and know and love. She had a lot of trouble speaking, even with the graft improving the burned areas, but I understood her perfectly despite her slurring and crooked speech.

Soon enough, I gave another graft, this time to a man named Joshua Glover. My dreams increased in frequency and the voice I heard increased in joy and volume as I did my classes with Noelle, and eventually I realized something critical: the figures I was seeing, that I had been so terrified of, had never been mutants. They had never been distorted humans deep in suffering, but the rewarded. Angel-like blessed ones who I was connected with in my dreams. I would've called them angels, and for a time I did, up until Noelle's outside image began to match her inside one. Until her body, slowly and steadily, morphed to resemble exactly what I was seeing in my heaven-sent visions. 'Disciples' is the more accurate term--I do not blaspheme by referring to my flock as the warriors of God.

When Joshua Glover, too, told me he was interested in finding God, I knew I had been right. This was my mission the entire time. I immediately went to the clinic again and gave a third graft, but I didn't stop there. I donated two fingers, one from each hand. I donated hair, too--all of it. I'd grow that much back, at least, right? I was gathering a flock, and you can't believe how happy I was.

But...it wasn't all fun. There were times when I cried, when I feared I had made mistakes. And, though my heart aches to say it, but there came a time when Noelle no longer needed me.

The flesh growing from over her face and changing her body may have been ugly to some, but I saw the divine soul radiating through them. It was beautiful. But the flesh grew as her faith grew, and eventually it consumed her. Wrapped her in its embrace, wrapped her in God's love, so that soon she could not speak nor see and her link to the world around her fell away. The flesh continued to overtake her, and soon it cocooned her, killing her physical form. I sobbed when I found what was left of her, even though I knew her work was done and that her soul had ascended to Heaven to meet our Father. All that was left behind was a piece of skin, one I recognized as fitting the exact shape of the scar on my back.

I took it and replaced it on my naked form, and it sealed itself to me as if it had never left, but it was better. It was a physical imprint of the Holy Ghost's power and contentment, and it felt healthier than it had when I had given it away. I realized that I needed my entire form to heal like that. I had a mission, and now I knew how to carry it out.

Though most were pleased, some members of my growing flock were horrified. They said that my flesh had 'infected' Noelle and 'eaten' her. Most of them left. It's quite alright, I forgive, as forgiveness is a virtue. I will find them again, and urge them to seek the true path as she did. I know they just need a gentle push. When I have gifted them this compelling joy, they will know.

Since then, I have taken further steps than ever to give of myself. Organs, bones, eyes, even my heart on one occasion, though I had to find very special clinics underground to do so with. I persist, as my blessing is divine in nature, until the donated organs suffuse their new bodies with the knowledge I have been given, and allow them to ascend, at which time I return to collect them, stronger through faith and unity.

More of my students continue to mold into disciples, and the process is not always smooth and painless, but it is always worth it. Any one of them will tell you how God's love truly changes a person. You will join my class, won't you? Come, we can go right now. Nonsense, nothing could be more important! I want you to feel the same happiness and contentment as I do, come with me--!

_Statement ends._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eesh. So he went here hoping to 'convert', huh? Doing follow-up on this one was unpleasant. Attis Reidd has vanished, whether dead or simply working underground, I can't say. We haven't gotten anything on him in years. Known members of his flesh cult were still active as recently as last year, but I haven't exactly met up with any of them. If I do, I'm hitting them with my car, just so you know. 
> 
> If he is still active out there, I don't want to think how powerful he might've become. By the look of things, the pieces of himself he sends out consume and add to his strength when he re-attaches them. It might take drastic measures to contain him if he ever comes back.


	28. Stash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Alvaro Stein, regarding his drug addiction. Original statement given December 11th, 2012. Statement transferred from the Usher Foundation January 14th, 2013.
> 
> Statement begins.

Drug addiction can destroy your life.

Statement of Captain Obvious, regarding the fucking obvious, yes, I know. But you have to understand the extent to which the chemicals you've altered your brain with can put you down a hole it's impossible to claw your way out of once you're in there. An addict never does catch the exact moment they go from controlling their addiction to their addiction controlling them, and most never realize it at all. The last rational thought a person on the harder stuff ever has is 'I can stop anytime'. And because you can, you don't need to, and because you have no desire to, you won't. You _could_ , and that's all that matters, so why _should_ you? But there are people out there, and I'm not just talking about lowlifes, who don't just understand drugs, they weaponize them. If you become a supplier and make people dependent on you, you have an endless source of cash. All you have to do is not give a damn about the lives you're ruining.

Crack. Heroin. Both so, so pleasant when you're enjoying them, and so fucking awful when you come down and need another fix. Either one is enough to reel in a regular customer, throw both in and you've got a fishing net.

There was a dealer named Doug, in my neighborhood, that was working his way up. Small-time thug, certainly someone you didn't want to mess with, but not a kingpin or anything. But he knew his stuff. He had the supply, and he kept raking in the cash. People like me, who were already addicts by the time he surfaced, were talking about him and taking an interest. At first it was just small supplies of weed, then crack, then heroin too, and before long he was handing out pills, too. He quickly got surrounded by friends, and as his supply grew, so did his authority in the hood. A lot of the older dealers started taking issue with this, since he was perceived to be moving in on their territory, but they went under, or had accidents, none of which was ever connected to him. Everyone suspected, though. But no one cared as long as he was able to top off their stash.

I actually got in good with this guy. You're not supposed to have addicts for protection, mixes up the supply and demand chain. But I sold myself as hard and loyal and reliable, and I got in with him, and not because I had ulterior motives. I didn't like him any more than I liked any drug dealer, but he seemed like the safest one to attach to at that moment, and besides, he presented a friendly enough face--definitely had a ruthlessness under the skin, of course, but a smile on top. And this way, I didn't have to pay as much for my supply. So I was able to see things that other people weren't, and make connections that they couldn't. I also had a friend, named Donna, who was quickly on her way out.

Donna and I had been friends for a long time, but the truth is, nothing else matters more to you than your stash when it comes to drugs. I'm not going to give you the whole lecture, but suffice it to say that normal, loving people with good heads on their shoulders will sell out their friends, family, kids, anyone they have to to get another hit off the smack. We had used to struggle, on an even keel, but we always worked it out, I think because we struggled together. One of us would flunk out of rehab and the other would be there next to the dumpster fire telling the other it was alright, and sharing the hits. But that changed when I joined up with Doug, which meant I was then part of the supply chain, even if I was just hired muscle. To her, who was dependent on Doug for her crack and her pills, this made me an easy access route, and that strained our relationship a lot. Addicts steal as easily as they breathe, and you'll only put up with losing so much cash in a short time.

She would plead with me, every other weekend, to suck up to Doug and get her some free coke, and I'd tell her there was no way it was happening, because even in the mire of my own drug problems, I could tell that it was a request that'd be shot down, and I was no sooner going to steal from a dangerous guy like Doug than I was going to fly. But she needed it. She needed it, she'd tell me, needed it so bad, and wouldn't I please help her, think of a friend in need, et cetera. She'd say this even on the occasions I was pretty sure she'd already raided my loose cash before bothering to ask. Mind you, I was no better. I stole cash and drugs from other people on the street on the regular, and my friends and family had long abandoned me for pulling the sort of shit I did. I was as dirty as any crack momma. But she was the one that could get away with it, for a while at least.

The final straw came when she tried to steal from my own stash. I had just had a long day and was ready to come home and get my fix, and I found her halfway through my stash of powder already. She must've meant to take it and leave, but snorted once and was gone from the neck up after that. And I got my gun out, and I got _real_ aggressive. She was up against the wall, the barrel was between her teeth, and her eyes were real wide like dinner plates as she realized how much she'd fucked up this time. I screamed my damn head off and made it very clear that if I ever saw her around my place again, I'd be rolling up her gray matter and smoking _that_. And she cried and she scampered the instant I let her go, and she didn't come back around me after that.

I regret it. It took me a long time to cool down and miss her, and by the time I did, I had stopped seeing her skulking around her usual haunts. I started to get kind of worried, and when I was sure she had actually vanished, I had a quiet little meltdown in my room about what I'd done. I had no idea where she was, but my greatest concern and the thing I was more and more sure of with each passing day was that she was dead. Not a surprising fate, for an addict on the streets, but Donna was good. She was good to me, at least, even at my worst, and she didn't deserve to die. None of us do, really. There's people that will be screwed in the head whether clean or dirty, but people don't realize that this shit twists your whole life and being around.

Now comes the part where I tell you about how crooked Doug was and how the war on drugs is bullshit. You ever heard of Bruce Savage? 'Course you have, he was running for senator, and he won it with those dashing good looks and hometown American good ol' boy charm.

Now, as for Doug, he had a number of hideouts we used from week to week, to keep the police off of us, although naturally, this worked a little too well to take it at face value, or for a clean person to do so at least. And in each of these hideouts, there was a 'back room' that no one but Doug was ever to enter. And when your dealer says never to enter a room, you listen to him, because Doug was still one of the more pleasant dealers I'd known in my life on the streets, and he had still killed people for less. We--by that I mean his rotating band of thugs playing bodyguard--just figured that these were where he produced his capital. None of us had ever seen him actually producing drugs or been shown some other place he could do so, so it lined up. None of us minded, but for when our need for a fix was bugging us, but the punishment always outweighed the desire to check in there for free drugs.

But being around to see and hear the rest of Doug's business, I was occasionally around for when he got a call, and to see him walk into his back room with a mutter of 'I've gotta take this', which was just weird. What exactly was he saying and who was he saying it to, that he couldn't do it in front of us? And this didn't concern me that much, until I pressed my ear to the keyhole of a somewhat thinner, shoddier back room door on one rotation and heard what he was saying.

He was talking to a 'Mr. Savage'. If you're surprised at the idea that politicians are corrupt and occasionally in contact with the bigger drug lords in their cities, you're an idiot. For a moment, it made sense how we'd never had much trouble with the police, despite Savage's campaign running on the promise that he'd end the drug trafficking in our shitty little state for good. But only for a moment, because then I noticed the tone of Doug's voice, and what he was actually saying. He was nervous, fearful even. And this didn't add up. Doug, if he were bribing or blackmailing the state senator to keep the PD's eyes turned away from his business, would've been confident, smug, self-assured. And if he had anything to fear from a politician, our force would probably have just been shut down with an overwhelming amount of white officers willing to gun down or imprison anyone black enough or poor enough. The only reason Doug could be sounding like such a kiss-ass as he pleaded for more time, he'd have the money soon, and so on and so forth.

Was Doug under Savage's thumb? What could a state senator have on him that would make Doug so scared? That was when I decided I had to know.

There was definitely a motive this time. I didn't like being in anyone's pocket, even though my drugged-up brain knew somewhere in there that being Doug's bitch the way I was qualified for that exact role. Plus, Doug was my bud. If he was in a bad position, I needed to help him, and protect both my good standing with him and my stash, which had started to dwindle recently. All this was enough to push me to try and discreetly find out what was going on in one of those back rooms. Most of them were in basement floors, deep enough underground that there was no chance of sneaking in through a window. But one of them was only one floor deep, so I figured I could probably find a small window if I looked around out back. All I had to do was not get caught.

Definitely easier said than done, but I found what I was looking for. A tiny little window a guy like me could barely squeeze through, with a drain cover placed right next to it. I peered down into it during daylight hours, and found a pretty normal room. It was still dark enough with the lights off that I couldn't see much, with the light from the window only illuminating a small square patch of the floor when I wasn't in the way of it. But I could tell that the room was small, and not very cluttered. From what I could see, this couldn't possibly be a room that a guy might be able to craft illicit drugs in under the radar, no way in hell. The first time I got there, as it always was when I checked it after in daylight. Knowing that Doug usually went in that room during evenings, I starting visiting the little window at night, and that was when I was able to catch Doug, and only once.

The light still wasn't on, so I could only see by moonlight, the shadow of my head was blocking most of that off. I realized how stupid that was way too late. I saw Doug standing there, off to the side, and in the middle of the floor, a trapdoor had opened up. I saw a pair of legs in jeans being pulled under by someone hiding under there. Corpse disposal. But then Doug looked up, directly at me, and my blood went cold. He and I stared at each other for a moment, when I was sure I'd need to get up and scram as fast as I could before he called the rest of his thugs out to cap me. But he just looked back down at the trap door, shook his head, and then unlocked the door and walked out. I could hear the heavy metal locks being keyed from the other side. 

And all of a sudden, I wanted to go down there. I don't know what came over me, 'cuz this wasn't just me being stupid. I had this urge to see for myself. I don't know what I thought was down there, maybe a tunnel leading out or something, maybe I could hold up whoever was down there and get them to show me out? But I was way too scared of whatever was down there for that to make sense. I was vaguely aware that I was in deep shit and that I needed to leave immediately, but it was like I was on strings. My body wasn't being controlled, not like you'd think. But it suddenly just made so much sense to try and see what was down there, maybe see if I could grab a hit or two from some secret coke stash if there was one underneath that trap door. And I opened the window, and I slid myself in, and I landed on the ground with a thud. The opening of the trapdoor faced away from me, toward the door.

Step by step, walking slow enough to hear the wooden floorboards underneath me creaking ever-so-slightly, I walked forward. I was looking around the room in a tiny, yet rapidly growing understanding that I wasn't in control of my body anymore, and that I really, really did not want to see what was underneath the trap door, but I was walking anyway. I craned my head around as I did, trying to get a look at the room around me in the dark, and now that I wasn't in the way anymore, the moonlight was shining in. There was a tiny little table, like you might set next to a bed, in the corner. I saw all the cobwebs around the room, and then I saw a glint. And I realized that it was a ring on a chain, the same one I had seen hanging against Donna's neck for years.

And I think that's what snapped me out of it. There was horror of course, a realization of what must've happened, but the shock of it cut the strings. Did I want to know what was down there? Did I want to see if my best friend's body was somewhere in the pile? Or would there even be a body to find? I couldn't smell any rotting corpses. Just dust and wood. I took off my shoe, very carefully, and, standing on the edge of the trapdoor, I dropped it on the floor on the other side.

And I was knocked backward off my feet as the trapdoor rose underneath me. It was lightning-fast. These two...legs, these hairy, awful, segmented legs longer than my own, launched out from the open spaced and dragged my shoe in right before the trapdoor closed again, and I woke up. About a million variations of the phrase 'fuck no' were going through my head, and I bolted. Climbed the wall and scrambled my big ass through that tiny window and didn't look back. That was the day I vanished, and moved all the way out of state. More than once.

I'm only back here to give this statement, and then I'm moving again. I've since broken, and gone to rehab, and it's been two years since I touched any substance I could abuse. Donna's gone, but Savage is still out there. It's amazing, seeing his face up on a billboard, campaigning for re-election, and seeing how shiny and black his eyes look and wondering how other people don't notice. I think he's been fueling the drug trade, and been spinning the web with drugs. Or spinning the drugs with webs. Whatever is going on down in those basements.

I need to go. That's all.

_Statement ends._


	29. Stormchaser

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Rex Mercer, regarding his profession. Original statement given May 22nd, 2016. Statement transferred from the Usher Foundation August 31st, 2016.
> 
> Statement begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my personal favorite statement of the bunch, hence why I saved it for the last one before the big finish. I hope you enjoy it.

Chasing storms has always been what I've wanted to do with my life.

I grew up in Florida, where, despite what you might think, waterspouts are relatively common. There's actually an understood distinction between the standard waterspout, which can be a cyclone that looks impressive and is certainly dangerous, but lacks the true destructive power of what you're thinking of when you hear the word, and a 'waterspout', which is a proper tornado with the same effects but much greater capacity for devastation that gets spawned by a cyclonic storm. That's the kind I've always liked, and what I went west to chase.

Think about 'big' for a moment. What's big to you? A rather tall fellow? A tree? A building? Think bigger. The Empire State building? The Statue of Liberty? Big Ben, the Observation Wheel, the Burj Khalifa? Think bigger. The biggest thing you can imagine will be rendered tiny, small, and helpless next to a stormcloud, especially one that's growing into a true nimbus. And its size is on the same axis as its power. You can't fight it or resist it the way you can a person, a group, or even a government. Storms are part of nature; they don't care about you or what you want, and when nature roars, you listen.

Alright, I'm waxing here, but the point is, it's a thrill. Ever since going out into the Midwest, I've been able to learn what a true storm is. I've been in the midst of them, both with a flimsy metal vehicle shielding me from the elements and without. Persons from milder climates might very well think the end of the world is upon them if they come out here. As for me, it's terrifying. Everything I just said applies, and it's palpable. The dread mounts as a day turns warm and wet and moist and a little too windy, and then there's terror once the collection of elements finally coalesces. Rain hitting like bullets, sometimes hail, the roar of the wind, the impossible darkness of the sky just before it lights up with flashes of lightning so white and hot and loud they make you jump out of your skin...it's _exhilarating_.

Oh, yes, it hits you to your soul with how terrified you are, but at the same time, the awe of it all...! There's wonder in it, in how a normal, pleasant day turns into a violent, ethereal, absolutely unreal world of chaos. Storms are art. Storms are...they have a raw beauty to them that can't be matched. And I knew as soon as I came out to Oklahoma for the first time and felt it for myself that this was what I wanted out of life, what I wanted to do.

Granted, it doesn't actually pay very well.

Stormchasing is easy to get into because there are virtually no legal hoops to jump through at all, but consequently, you don't get money just for throwing yourself into danger. If you're lucky and good enough at what you do, you can sign on with your local weather association and they'll pay you to gather data on incoming storms, but that's a rare chance and there's far more stormchasers that don't bother than do. If you've got a camera, you can sell footage of storms, which is one way to make money, and that was the route I chose back in late 2012. And that was also how I got to know Colt Mercer.

Mind, I wasn't averse to the idea of internet fame, and I was lucky enough to have a real name that sounds like an invented persona. 'Rex Bauer' just doesn't hold up to 'Colt Mercer', though, that one just screamed 'badass'. And he was. Colt was a professional--29 compared to my 24, young for a chaser but with a knowledge of storms and a level of equipment and technical know-how that would've shamed the elders in the field. That wasn't all about him that was impressive, though. He was tall, and despite looking even younger than he was, part of his hair in the front was graying, which I took to be stress-aged hair from adrenaline rush after adrenaline rush. He always wore a rain jacket that he made look good, but I later learned he wore honest-to-god leather during chases, in which the degree of ruin he put the jacket through was something he took home like a mark of pride. He had a strong jaw and bright blue eyes that were always open a little wider than they needed to be, making him look more genuine when he smiled and also a little off, like he was excited about something. Colt was hosting a chasing tour--that's where you sign on and pay to chase with an established storm-watcher in their vehicle. I signed on hoping it would be my gateway to chasing professionally, not to mention getting a handle on the equipment I'd need to chase properly and to film it for the internet.

I said that Colt was tall, right? Tall, very solid, extremely friendly, strong grip when he shook my hand, deep voice...you get the idea, an easy guy to get smitten with. And I _really_ wanted to impress him. This was a guy who had gotten his start back in 1999 at age 19, and who was known to brave Dixie Alley, and who had been all over the Midwest else-wise in his pursuit of storms. I wasn't disappointed when I met up with him and was able to review his technique alongside his footage. We had been corresponding for a month before he thought the time was ripe to get me out and under the rain. Stormchasing can sound stupid from a time standpoint--you can spend days doing nothing but waiting, and then risk missing the storm or finding that one busts, not to mention the risk to your life if things go the way you actually want them to. My biggest fear was that I'd end up driving out to El Reno with him only for us both to be disappointed and have to go back with nothing to show for it. But Colt was on the money, and a big tornadic storm was burgeoning. I'm talking big, and you know the one, don't you? Knew it as soon as I said 'El Reno'.

What happened to me that changed me wasn't the two-and-a-half mile-wide beast that tore through the county, though I did witness it and have long suspected Colt to have had a hand in it. Not that it doesn't qualify--even after my experience, you don't see that sort of thing without changing on some level. But this was a few days earlier in that same tornado outbreak. Tornadoes are what every chaser truly dreams of going after. They are _the_ capital-S Storm. The supreme, unparalleled depiction of nature's wrath at its most perfect form. They call those things 'the finger of God' out here, and it's easy to see why. I was nothing short of thrilled that we were heading into this sort of intensity.

It had _everything_. The sky gone all dark, huge raindrops pelting the windshield like rocks, wind so loud you had to raise your voice even inside the car. We were heading straight in, watching a funnel form, and everyone was excited, but as we got closer and closer, the other guys--oh, shit. I forgot to tell you there were other guys with us. Well, there were, Colt has his own whole chasing crew, but they aren't important to the story. The thing is, they wanted to turn around and back off a bit, seeing that we were getting a little too close to this thing and that if it turned just a smidge in the wrong direction, it'd swallow us up. Colt wasn't having it. Told them they could leave if they wanted to, he was going to confront this thing...and he turned to me, and asked me, hey, I'd go, wouldn't I? I had the nerve, didn't I?

I swallowed. Obviously, this was a test. This was a pivotal moment where I could prove to him that I had what he was looking for in a stormchaser. I...didn't really feel the need to go further, to be honest. I love to chase, but I'm not stupid about it. I didn't want to risk getting myself hurt or killed...but at the same time, I wanted to go out there, too. This was the big moment, the climax, the true core of a storm begging to be seen and experienced. I needed it. And then there was him--I wanted to impress him so badly, but not so badly that I wanted _him_ to get injured, either. Was I willing to risk it all...? Yes, I was.

Colt grinned and said he'd known he could count on me. The others drove back, and we pressed on. Eventually, we were so close to the storm that our vehicle was fighting wind, actually getting blown off-course if Colt didn't vigorously keep us on the road. The wind was incredibly loud, and the only thing I could see through the rain was a massive shape descending from the sky down to the ground. And when I say massive, I mean _immense_. Most pictures and videos you see of tornadoes are taken much further away than we were, albeit there was still a few miles to go before it was on top of us. So, naturally, Colt decided to abandon the station wagon and press forward on foot. I objected to this only for a moment and not aggressively enough to override him. The gleaming look in his wide blue eyes was...infectious. It was the look of a man seeing the most beautiful thing in his life. He wanted to get closer, and to be honest, I did, too.

I regretted that somewhat when we actually opened the car doors, which flung open in the wind so violently I heard them creak as though they were about to come off. As soon as I was out of the car, I felt afraid. The wind...I could barely hear Colt over it, and he was yelling to speak to me a mere five feet from me. He circled around to check my equipment and make sure we had the cameras, and then we got moving. First walking, then jogging, then running, into something that made no sense to run towards.

Out there, it's a different world. You can't imagine it.

The rain felt like actual bullets hitting my exposed skin, and the howling wind threatened to drag my skin off of my skull. Everything was so pitch-black, and even if we could've heard each other over the roar around us, we could only yell for so long before the vicious thunder drowned us out. Lightning was striking sky-to-ground, often much too close to us, leaving me dizzy and blinking stars out of my eyes. I felt like I was pushing my luck, like we were going to get eaten by the storm if we kept on in this way. I was terrified, in absolute horror at where I was and what was happening, but all the same, I kept going, because why not? We were already too close to outrun it, and there was nothing to hide behind for miles. We got plenty of footage, but I was being pulled, and I called to Colt for help. We abandoned the cameras in a ditch just before I was swept up in the airflow, and he grabbed me by the hand and grounded me.

I mean that. No, I didn't think anything supernatural of it immediately, but my feet stayed attached to the ground, and he dragged me in, closer, running at first alongside him and then trailing behind him, his hand locked around my wrist. And the wind seemed to...not relax, but to quiet, as if it had gone hoarse. Not all at once. Bit by bit, step by step. It was still there, going hundreds of miles per hour and threatening to drag us up into the sky, but Colt defied it, and I did so with him. The dust and debris blowing by us stopped bothering my eyes, and the pain of the huge droplets hitting me by the dozens every second stopped stinging so much.

We ran, and the tornado ran to meet us. Colt slowed, and stopped, just as that massive funnel bore down on us, staring up at it like it was someone he loved. That enormous black wall of power and wrath and beauty, that stopped seeming so solid once it was close enough. The storm was bearing down on us, and throughout all of this, I hadn't stopped being scared for my life. After being silent for a long time, I screamed Colt's name, and only as I did so did I realize I didn't need to, the wind had quieted so much. Colt still had me by the wrist, and as long as he did, I felt like I wouldn't get pulled away. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and--God, was he always so tall? Stupid thing to focus on in that moment, I know, but I did. There was a violent funnel cloud a mere four hundred feet from us, and I couldn't stop staring at him, and how solid he seemed. How, even out here with the world coming apart, he seemed immovable and unconcerned. Then I looked him in the eye. His eyes were so shiny I thought he might've been crying--I wouldn't have been able to tell with the wind--but his expression was unmitigated, radiating joy and wonder. His eyes seemed so blue and so deep, like the whole world was behind them. The smile on his face was soft, but genuine. Looking at him didn't make the storm around us disappear, it didn't even make it seem less threatening--moreso in fact. We were tiny and helpless and insignificant and soon to die, that fact was hammering home more deeply than ever. So why, why did I feel so concerned with him, and what he was thinking? And he suddenly looked down, looked away from the hand of God coming straight for us, and his expression didn't change when he looked at me instead.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't realize this might be too much for you."

You'll roll your eyes listening to this, what with all he told me of my 'nerve' back when we split from the group. But he wasn't lying when he said it. Being this close, the storm actually passing over us in its most powerful and raw and murderous, thrilled him so genuinely, and I could feel it in him. I could feel it in me, too, and that sensation combined with the utter terror I was feeling of my own helplessness. The one should've canceled out the other, but they sort of fused inside me. This was what I had wanted, after all. I had wanted to chase storms, dreamed of getting close to a tornado...and it was everything I'd hoped for and more. I looked one last time up at the advancing tornado, and found the howl of its wind wasn't senseless or chaotic. There was form and shape in it, like a voice. I could hear it behind my consciousness and all around me. I might've been going mad in that moment, but...well, I'll tell you in a minute.

Colt and I looked at each other again, and I think he saw the turmoil in me. He pulled me close, and I felt again how solid he was and how much stronger than me he was. Even so, I tried to hold myself up against him, telling him it wasn't too much for me. It had seemed to me, up until now, that Colt was a man possessed. That he had no fear whatsoever, even when he should. It had been intimidating. But now I realized that he hadn't rid himself of his fear, he had simply embraced it. And he embraced me, and I him, and the funnel passed us over. Despite a million things being sucked up that could have hit us, none did. We stayed on the ground until just after it had passed. I felt my feet leave the dirt for only a moment, and then we were traveling so insanely fast in the blink of an eye I almost thought that I'd dreamed it.

We were back where we had left the van. The tornado was still powerful and immense, but moving in a different direction now.

Those eyes of his still gleamed with a soft, yet undiluted happiness when he looked at me. He told me I was the best, truest stormchaser he'd ever met, and that he'd be happy to have me in his caravan. Though I was still dazed, I was changed, as I said before. I knew that, when he was talking about taking me on as a companion, he didn't mean in a professional sense. He meant partners in the field of storms. Maybe not an equal yet, but soon, someone who could feel in his core the same way he did. What I mean by this is, he saw how I had been changed, and he approved, and I realized that I did, too.

Things were different from that day. The wind I felt no longer seemed just the brush of air across me, but something I could feel in its stretching entirety. I could feel a raindrop on my cheek and get a sense of how many there were in the air at that exact instant. My love for storms grew bigger and brighter than it ever had been before. Lightning didn't scare me anymore, it thrilled me, called out to me.

He held my hand again a few days later when we went back to El Reno. He called it the Beast, but the name never caught on. We didn't get nearly so close that time, but the poor saps who did...well, they were honored appropriately. We stood by and watched the biggest tornado on record destroy everything in its path for miles, and I had this strange feeling that he was showing me this less because he wanted to show me a storm, and more like it was because he discreetly wanted me to see something of _his_. Something he might've been afraid to show me before. Like showing a friend something you'd made geeking out over your favorite show when until then you hadn't really let on how much you were absorbed in it. He's never admitted to me that he had anything to do with El Reno, but I know he knows I suspect, and he hasn't bothered to stop me. We both smile thinking of that day.

It didn't have to be romantic. My crush on Colt was now suffused with a deep amount of awe, fear, trauma, and existential re-evaluation. But he met me halfway. We started dating in December of that year. He's awe-inspiring... He's just one man, diminutive and unimportant where nature is concerned, but he wants to be diminutive and unimportant with me. It's a weird sort of relationship to describe. Do we love each other? Yes. Would either one of us be too devastated if we had stayed friends, or perhaps never spoken again? Not entirely. Even if I can't really feel the level of celebrated love and passion I think I was supposed to, there's happiness and contentment in its place. And I think that's fine.

Now, about the tornado...and about Colt. About everything, really, about how it's been with me and the vicious sky since. I don't know if I can...well, I can try.

You know those women, who get to loving 'bad boys' who are obviously dangerous and are going to end up hurting them, even though they refuse to see it...? Well, that's not really accurate, but it's the closest comparison I can find. I'm aware that I'm not normal anymore and that I've drifted quite a bit from who I used to be. It's the scale of it, you know? The power. That's what I felt when I looked into the heart of that tornado, it's what I feel when I look into Colt's eyes, and it's what I feel every waking moment in my relationship with the...being, that has made my head and heart its home.

I mean, you see something that's just monstrous, it's a million times more powerful than you, bigger and stronger to such a degree that you don't even register, and it could go about not caring about you at all, and it could very easily kill you and render you a dead flotsam without even noticing you were there. And instead...it _does_ notice you. It looks down at you. It sees you, and it tells you that it loves you. Its gaze focuses on you, even though you should hardly matter. That affects you. It's how this entity called out to me and speaks to me, and it's how I roll with Colt. Yes, we are both intimately aware that nothing in the universe truly matters and that life is fleeting and people come and go...but this once, for this one person, we'll put ourselves out, and smile for them and with them.

Could this end badly? I don't think I could care even if I tried. I still chase storms, and I'm due to start hunting in Dixie Alley, now. Colt is still the professional, and we just finished an extended stay together, a few months of being each other's after he made me Rex Mercer. Now I'm chasing alone for a little while, and he's off on some other projects he's working on a bit closer to the Gulf. He seems pretty excited about it, says that 2017 is going to be a great year for storms. I didn't know he'd had pilot training, don't know why he bothers.

Some part of me, tiny and insignificant, worried a little, back when it was first dawning on me that I hadn't seen sunny weather even once since emerging from El Reno with Colt. Now I don't care.


	30. Abyss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> History of the End of the World. Anecdotal chronicle emulating the style and diction of ancient holy texts (most prominently the Bible) located on a beach by Gertrude Robinson. Object was thoroughly probed and, once determined to not be in any way dangerous, submitted to the Archives as a testimony. Audio transcript recorded by Gertrude Robinson and submitted as a potential case file.
> 
> Statement begins.

Testing, testing, Gertrude Robinson recording.

This text, hereafter referred to as the account, was discovered washed up on a beach. Suspicion carrying me as it always does around books, I passed it to several assistants in order to determine the contents and possible effects. From their study, it does not appear to be immediately dangerous in any fashion, nor does it appear to be associated with the library of Jurgen Leitner. Its contents are, however, bizarre.

The book's binding is leather, which should have made both it and the pages within extremely susceptible to water damage and thus virtually useless, but it remains in perfect reading condition absent an abundance of missing pages. The front and back covers are both featureless, bearing neither title nor image, and the spine is similarly blank. The actual length of the account's contents are not so many words, barely passing novella length, but appear to have been hand-written over a long period of time, in a rather large scrawl, to such an extent that its page count is on par with the average biblical text. For the sake of time, I will be reading a transcript of significantly more manageable type font and absent the numerous pages of unintelligible babble and scribble. The person who chronicled these alleged events gives a name to themselves in the first page, declaring their ownership of the text and claiming to have written it, and goes by 'Dekker'.

The account is split into fifteen 'books'. Presumably there are also chapters, but with how many pages have been scribbled out, it is impossible to know for sure. The individual 'verses' that remain are compiled here. Beginning audio transcription now.

Book: Revelation

  1. "And there was suffering and strife without end."
  2. "The bountiful world gifted to mankind was raped, tortured, killed, and revived, and raped again."
  3. "The shortages of oil and food and water led to shortages of life and peace."
  4. "The Cycle of Conquest remained for a time endless, containing War, Famine, and Pestilence within and all in service of Death."
  5. "Those without suffered and began to hate, until their anger boiled over and they took up weapons against the kings."
  6. "Each time the Tree of Life was refreshed with the blood of tyrants, Paradise reigned for a short time, before power corrupted as disease in the new governments."
  7. "And the mad kings turned and raped and tortured and killed their citizens again and again."
  8. "But the Earth as a mirror to her people soon began to suffer their decay and starvation."
  9. "God did not answer the Earth or her people: they fought until they could fight no more, and this was called the Annihilation."
  10. "The Annihilation left the Earth barren as never before, a scarred corpse."
  11. "And their parties and democracies and secrets and lies were left meaningless with mankind reduced to the primitive tools of eons past."
  12. "And within the Annihilation, the Dread Powers reigned as God, feasting on the carcasses of mankind, their their War and Famine and Pestilence fattening the idols of Terror."
  13. "And the Dread Powers were as self-destroying as the men they preyed upon, eating and killing themselves to destruction."
  14. "But the Annihilation's unholy fires had not destroyed all; disciples remained, among those the Londonite scholars, once titled the Magnus Institute."
  15. "The Magnus Institute came to be called the Magnus Archive, writing down mankind's history of the end the world."



If I had to guess, I would say that the choice of title for this first 'book' is a mocking one. It does not pass me by that the tone of the whole account and its style come in an odd light when remembering Adelard Dekker and his insipid faith in God. Whether the chronicler is a reborn Adelard, a time traveler, or simply someone who took on the name in their time, I can't say. But those with any exposure to the Christian religion, particularly the book of Revelation, would find familiarity with the figures of the Horsemen represented here.

The verses are not difficult to decipher here, nor are they anywhere, so I can at least thank the Magnus Institute, or 'Archive' as they put it, for sticking to a common language and dialect for untold millenia. Dekker has described with a disdaining air the well-documented phenomenon of tyrannical governments abusing their people. I would raise my eyebrow at the description of it as a 'cycle', as it right now feels rather more like a hole we're dug into, but I digress. Consider me bitter on the lack of details regarding the supposed rebellions of the masses.

Moving on. The second book is comparatively rather short, comprising much more unintelligible material and less than half as many verses.

Book: Crossroads

  1. "Mankind's carcass, with its Magnus Archive clutched close, staved off the permanent End."
  2. "Mankind traded his technology and firearms for occultism once more, embracing the study of the Dread Powers and idolatry of them."
  3. "The remnants were fed upon by the Dread Powers until all those that remained evaded them, taking shelter under their Archive."
  4. "And Man, with his lists and knowledge and terror and memories of what once was, began to Know and plan."
  5. "The Earth was dark as the darkest night, and burned and scarred and full of monsters and joy was driven out until all that remained was faith in God."
  6. "And faith in God died as They never answered."
  7. "Man could not call upon God to save them and in his stead would use God's power against Them to reshape the world."
  8. "The dusty pages spoke to the remnants and they began to craft a grand ritual."
  9. "And envoys were sent out to those servants of the Dread Powers bearing the seal of the Archive."



Sounds about right. Crisis does beget appeal to a higher power.

The nature of these descriptions remains so physical and on occasion ideological that it makes me wonder how the Lonely is holding up during all of this. Obviously the more viscerally basic Powers would've been having a field day, but if civilization collapses, do its reasons to impress isolation onto the individual cease to exist as well? I suppose I'll soon find out.

Book: Animus

  1. "The Great All-Knowing One was the first of Fourteen and was near death."
  2. "And the Great All-Knowing One sent its chroniclers out to find those concubines of its other faces."
  3. "Who will help Me? it said, Who will restore the Earth that We have eaten to Extinction?"
  4. "And the Sly Spider Mother, so close was she to the Great All-Knowing One, that She granted her help immediately."
  5. "The Creeping Infestation was as well eager to assist, and swore Their allegiance, while the Great All-Powerful One did not care and saw no reason not to."
  6. "The Maw and the Piper took time to decide, so great was their enjoyment of the remnants' desperation."
  7. "Soon, the Piper promised His donations, while the Maw continued to wait."
  8. "The End needed no persuasion, as the termination of mankind would feed Him and doom Him at once, and so He had no choice."
  9. "The Flesh enjoyed power in this final hour with the rise of man's descent into feasting on himself, but saw the truth of the Great All-Knowing One's words, and committed Himself and Herself."
  10. "No servants of the Choking Embrace or the Forsaken remained, having lost their terrors to a world in which seeking shelter and community were ingrained into the remnants' very being."
  11. "The Twisting Deceit and the Almost-Human granted their fealty, fearing their own demise with that of mankind."
  12. "The Desolation was powerful in this age and abhorred the concept of saving the Earth from her torturous death, but did not deny the coalition."
  13. "They, instead, proposed the idea of sacrificing one of the Dread Powers to ensure the survival of the rest, and the Maw savored this and pledged assistance."
  14. "Alone of the Dread Powers, the Darkness did not commit for they were powerful and devoted to tearing down the remnants' beacons of light and civilization one after another, their greatest world soon upon them."
  15. "And of the remaining Twelve, Eleven turned and hunted their kin."



Yes, I can well imagine the Dark enjoying the death of the world a bit too much to let it go. It's easy to forget that, with the expanse of civilization in the past two or three centuries, the Dark is one of the oldest and most malevolent of the Powers. A world brought to ruin, with no sun to bring relief from the endless night, and no electricity to master it with? I shudder a bit, myself. As for the Vast...I suppose that's better than nothing. If we ever get into a crisis, we can at least count on them to give so few shits that helping is no more undesirable than _not_ helping.

And the Buried and the Lonely died out, did they? God needs prayer badly, I suppose. I imagine the end of the world to not be that dissimilar to a completed ritual. Too much horror, too much danger lurking out of sight, to really focus on one's distance from others, or to fear small spaces that otherwise might be your saving grace. Which, with no mention of Dekker's hypothesized fifteenth power, leaves us with twelve, the oh-so-sacred number, and one a traitor. Biblical indeed.

Book: Climax

  1. "With eleven heads gnawing at the neck of the twelfth, the Great All-Knowing One saw hope."
  2. "Those hidden in the dark, wherever they took refuge, were dragged screaming into the burning light and held captive."
  3. "Beacons of light blossomed, crossing the surface of the world like the stars that had vanished from the sky."
  4. "The teeming creatures that lurked in the land without sun that had thought to feast on the dying remnants of mankind instead felt the terror of being hunted down to the last."
  5. "Those with claws and eyes and fangs and tongues and those that hissed and whispered and slipped through and those that were still and faded all alike were taken and caged, hoarded to the last like jewels."
  6. "The blind ones who spoke the language of the pitch-black pool, too, were taken, and so many beings that reveled in the shadows and the dark corners were bound and made to bleed."
  7. "The Eleven, with their collection of sacrifices, then enacted a ritual, a great mass ritual to slay one and feed millions."
  8. "The Great All-Powerful One offered to fuel the chants, while the Desolation set the bodies to the pyre, and one thousand smaller rituals connected to form the Spider Mother's net of chaos."
  9. "The Maw hunted more down and fed them to the Piper, who butchered them and sang His song as he did, and the End drank it all in."
  10. "The Dread Powers tore the shadows apart and broke them down for fuel, and in their ritual created something new."
  11. "And stormclouds filled the sky, droplets of the Devil ready to fall and burn."



'Droplets of the Devil'. Between that line and the descriptions of what come after this feeding of a mass ritual, I suspect Dekker is describing the creation of a new chemical. This chemical, I suppose, combusts when brought into contact with salt water, and does not reconstitute it in a harmful way, but I've no idea what kind of chemical would create that reaction. I've never been much of a physicist nor chemist. No one else had any answers. Of course, I might be overthinking things. My underground contact did, after all, advise me that mathematical answers are rare among the Entities and often of very little help wherever they are found.

The next 'book' appears to be where the story takes a turn for the dramatic.

Book: Dessication

  1. "With the great storm brought on by the slaying of the Darkness's eyes and teeth and hair and fingers, its limbs extending into the world, came the climax."
  2. "The Eleven sought, with the severings of these appendages, to tear open the Darkness' ribcage and crush its heart once and for all."
  3. "This was done and with the great storm, was brought to an end the Darkness' greatest stronghold, the sea itself."
  4. "The rains found the waters of the ocean and burned them, set the surface alight with a flame so bright the coasts became the house of the blind."
  5. "The smoky fumes of burning ocean were so great and vast that mankind almost perished within them, coughing and choking."
  6. "And every remaining creature suffered, inhaling of the toxic fumes or burned in the combusting sea."
  7. "The Darkness cried out, burned and blinded and bleeding, with the world so bright and hot it could not bear the agony of it and would have died to escape it, and die it did."
  8. "Once Fourteen, the Twelve became Eleven forever more."
  9. "The Earth suffered and gasped and cried, but She survived as water was burned away, leaving her surface clear."
  10. "And the stormclouds persisted for a week after a week, exposing great valleys and canyons and ravines and the crevices of the Earth."
  11. "And this was called the Great Desolation, for it brought the Desolation to its most powerful and most joyful."
  12. "The Earth continued to burned, and God cried."
  13. "And when the rain finally slowed and stopped, the world was left bone-dry."



Hmm. We're getting rather more straightforward here, I suppose. There are more scribblings in this book than any of the others, some pages entirely blacked out, and there are pages ripped at the spine, as though Dekker or someone else thought to tear them out, and thought better of it.

Book: Excoriation

  1. "And in the wake of the storm, when the fumes cleared, mankind slowly bled out of their homes and back into the world."
  2. "And this was called the Great Unveiling."
  3. "And though horrified by what they had wrought, the remnants observed a bounty as never before."
  4. "The burning of the oceans had left behind all its animal life cooked, many once-vibrant fish and other sea creatures that had not been reduced to ash instead left blacked and salted."
  5. "An abundance of food lay waiting in the valleys, with all life that would have rotted it now gone."
  6. "The clouds would soon rain fresh water that mankind could drink of and never drown in."
  7. "Weather patterns had been forever changed, and hurricanes had been consumed by the fire along with the oceans that spawned them, to be forgotten along with the old world."
  8. "And what laid behind the veil of the ocean was a mystery no more, and ripe for human settlement."
  9. "The World was re-created, and God smiled and cried."



I admit to spending more time than was probably worth it analyzing the title of this 'book'. 'Excoriation' refers to stripping the outer layer of something, usually in the manner of flaying or skinning. Obviously it could simply refer to stripping the surface of our blue world of its 'skin', but I've never trusted the Stranger enough to simply let it pass by like that. Of note in this particular segment is the use of the word 'human', which is otherwise conspicuously absent, with all other references to the species that civilized the planet using 'mankind' or 'remnants' instead. Perhaps Dekker simply slipped up...? But I feel as though I'm missing something here.

Book: Eden

  1. "And mankind rejoiced."
  2. "Mankind ate, and drank, and fucked, and grew plentiful once more in the sore flesh of the Earth."
  3. "And they never forgot their fears, but their brood grew so much that Terror soon had more to feed on than it ever needed."
  4. "Adobe huts crafted from the dried silt soon gave rise to villages and towns and cities."
  5. "Mankind sprawled and loved and warred again."
  6. "Civilization bloomed from a near-fatal end, and engineering minds soon saw the rebirth of a mechanical society and all its ills."
  7. "But the Earth was happy for them, and mankind rejoiced with no end to celebration in sight."
  8. "They had been saved from Extinction."



Well, isn't that a surprise. At last a mention of capital-E Extinction, and nothing else. Congratulations, Dekker. Your efforts have been recognized post-mortem, for what it's worth. Although this is more of a stumbling block; I still can't be sure if it's just an odd word choice, intentionally referential, or another possible mockery. If it was meant as entirely literal in reference to the proposed fifteenth Dread Power, it would make this sentence rather odd and un-expounded on.

Unfortunately, six of the eight remaining books are lost. All that remains of them are the blacked-out pages, with anything left being ripped out and unrecovered by the time of this recording. Although I don't intend to let this account take up all of my time, my suspicions are running high, and I suspect there may be valuable material missing. Ripping that many pages out does seem a bit much to be anything but intentional sabotage.

It's no wonder the Eye loves me so much. Even when I have an inkling that it might be better not to know, I pursue it anyway.

The next available part of the account is the thirteenth 'book'.

Book: Inevitable

  1. "And Slaughter grew powerful."
  2. "And Flesh grew strong, and Maw grew fierce."
  3. "They alone flourished, all other Powers having withered to nothing; the Great All-Powerful One and the Great All-Knowing One both faded to oblivion."
  4. "The Spider Mother survived, having bore witness to mankind's hubris and Ouroboros, and persisting without knowing why."
  5. "The End grew weary, no longer willing to persist its inverse existence as mankind whittled themselves to near nothing."
  6. "The Desolation was weak and near death, and none mourned its final passing."
  7. "The Twisting Deceit and the Almost-Human were gone, and none remembered them."
  8. "The Creeping Infestation was nearing its final breath, and no one cared to prolong it."
  9. "Mankind could not escape their torturous self-destruction."
  10. "Centuries passed and became millenia, and millenia became eons."



Oh, naturally. I suppose humankind being anything other than self-destructive would be boring, no?

Book: Beyond

  1. "And no one remembered a time when shadows had not existed."
  2. "Mankind had settled so much land that they could now see the trenches dipping deep beneath the Earth's crust, places so deep the light could not reach."
  3. "The sun had remained for these last hundred million years, and only a few wondered why it did not reach the depths, but many wondered what laid within them."
  4. "The laughing, singing, ripping beast has claimed many, and mankind descends yet again, but no Great Annihilation comes."
  5. "Our technology has not left us, and neither has our fear."



It is at this point that the account abandons its chronicling style and is from then on told in present tense, much like a diary.

The remaining 'verses', written still by 'Dekker', describe a mounting morbid fascination both with death and the unknown. He records the slow and steady deaths of the Corruption, the Spider, the temporary rebirth of Desolation before it was slain, and the approaching ends of the Flesh, Hunt, and Slaughter, as the number of lives that can be deeply entrenched in their terror continues to dwindle. Apparently, 'Dekker' has taken to calling their self an Archivist, but no mention is made of the distinction between this and chronicler, nor is any connection made to the Magnus Institute, which remains unmentioned since the events before the Great Desolation, and if I am inferring correctly, may have finally shut down and been forgotten in and of itself. Good riddance, Jonah's name needs to die one day for good.

The last book focuses Dekker's attentions purely on what lies in the trenches where the Darkness awaits.

Book Fifteen:

  1. "The ocean was long forgotten, but the Abyss was not."
  2. "Stones dropped into its depths do not echo back to us. Light refuses to penetrate no matter how strong and bright the beam."
  3. "Investigations produce nothing. After a certain point, all possible communication ceases as the lengths of rope and metal we use take us beyond the reach of sound waves."
  4. "Settlement cannot occur on the Edge, as the Abyss inhales any temptation, any attempt to circumvent its own unknowable-ness. All inevitably crumble under their own weight and fall into its pitch."
  5. "Those who have chosen not to join the battlefields or take up weapons have sometimes come to stare into the Abyss, and their findings differ greatly."
  6. "I have long suspected it is the rebirthing place of the Darkness, an intrinsic terror we had long forgotten. But I confess that, although symbolically appropriate for it to be reborn as the Eleven die, I have no proof for this."
  7. "My theory is doubted by my elders, peers, and opponents alike. Even I doubt myself somewhat. The depths of the Abyss are so absolute, could Mr. Pitch truly thrive there?"
  8. "Pilgrimages are popular among those who are of enough scope to abandon the Piper. Occasionally, some jump."
  9. "Some becomes many; the practice of 'diving' has become popular, and theorizing on what waits for those that do so abounds in our dialogues."
  10. "Some said that the Abyss led to the afterlife, a direct portal to what comes after. They jumped to find it." 
    1. "Some said that there was an entirely different world laying beyond the endless blackness. They jumped to know it." 
      1. "And still others said that what waited for us in the depths was our saving grace. They jumped to chase it." 
        1. "As humanity continues to drive itself to its grave, my curiosity has arisen, and I lament to my elders that I have chosen to sate it. I can only tell you what happened after for me, and I do not know if it happened to the others." 
          1. "As for me, the darkness did not end. I am falling still."



...

...Well. A rather sudden end. I suppose halting it cleanly and decisively wouldn't have inspired me to investigate. I am too weary of questions in general to ask the ones that come most readily apparent in that final line. I cannot help but feel, however, that the final line...jumps out at me in some manner. I have an uncanny feeling towards it, as though a word is missing. It feels addressed to me, specifically somehow. Not the account itself, I'll not be so presumptuous as to propose that. But that last line...it feels as though this 'Dekker' omitted my name when he might not should have.

Or, maybe I'm rambling. We're firmly in existential territory here. I will continue to study this material as I go, offering occasional supplemental recordings if I should need to, but I can't let this bizarre book distract me too much from my work. Elias is still plotting, and the others of the Dread Powers are still scheming. I'll just have to return to this venture when I have time.


	31. Curse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Deandre Blackwell, regarding local power outages. Statement dated 9th of October, 2018 and submitted in writing. Received 11th of October, 2018.
> 
> Statement begins.

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend and I decided to do something stupid. We snuck into our old secondary school after-hours.

Both of us are nineteen, and already finished with studies, so it wasn't like we were after test answers or anything. And we live on our own, so there wasn't any likelihood of having to deal with a parents' bullshit if we got caught. We didn't, though. Mostly, we snuck in just for the thrill of it. Dumb as hell to begin with, for all we knew we could've been totally wrong about there not being any cameras on at night, and in retrospect I hadn't even thought about the street cams on the nearby roads. But we got in without a hitch, and it wasn't a security guard we found lurking around in there.

I'm not entirely sure what it was, actually. It definitely wasn't human. We were meandering down a hall, guffawing to ourselves about how cool it was to see what the place was like after hours when all the lights were off and no one was here. Our school didn't h have anything like rumors about ghosts of deceased students, or anything like that. So we didn't really know what to think when we passed a bathroom in the hallway and heard a door creaking. We swung our torches around, completely spooked, and nothing happened for a few moments. We just stared at the door, which was hanging ajar. If I'd been paying more attention at that time, I'd have remembered that the doors were weighted so they closed if nothing was holding them open. As it was though, I just figured a draft must've blown through, and we reluctantly turned and kept walking.

We went around a bend in the hallway and were most of the way down this one when we heard it again. That creak, closer than it should've been. We swung around, and this time we saw it. This...apparition. I say it wasn't a human, because it was completely shadowed. I don't want to say 'completely black' because that makes it sound like it was clearly visible and just had a dark complexion. It was standing at the end of the hallway, where we had come from, and it was impossible to make out any details on it. Even though it should've been sharply visible down to the details, it was like this heavy shadow was hanging over it that our torches couldn't penetrate. Couldn't make out clothes, a face, or anything but the silhouette, but it wasn't a shadow. It was too solid and it took up space. It waited a moment and started to walk toward us, and we unfroze and booked it the hell out of there.

Our footfalls were so loud in the quiet of the empty school, that I doubt I'd have heard extra footsteps running behind us even if I was listening for them. I know it was chasing us, though, because our torches started to dim as we headed for an exit, realized we couldn't get it unlocked, and opted to just bust a window and flee that way. I could feel it behind me, trying to catch me, and I felt something grab my shoulder as I hopped over the broken window frame and followed Wendy out. I shook it off in a panic and ran even faster.

Getting home was difficult. When we had come to the school, the moon had been full and bright and there were no clouds in the sky. When we ran out, it was heavily overcast and we could barely see. We took the long way home because it was lit by street lamps; passing under them felt awful somehow, like it was highlighting boundaries beyond which ghosts and monsters were running alongside me, and I could feel something dragging at me as I passed under the lights. The final stretch to our cheap apartment, though, had no streetlights whatsoever, and it was the worst by far, because the barrier was gone. Something chasing us would get us for sure if we didn't hurry inside fast enough.

But we got inside, locked all the doors, and turned on the lights. We stayed up extremely late, discussing what had happened and what the hell that apparition had been. By the next day, though, we felt we were back to normal. It took me a while to realize I had been cursed.

It started with my phone. I barely noticed I was having to turn it on more often, like the screen was just going to sleep a lot faster than it should be. I got the picture when I realized how fast its battery was draining, and I just blew it off as a cheap phone and got pissed that I'd have to fork over another one. Then, it was the lights. A bulb went dead, and that wasn't much to worry about, happens all the time, right?

Then every bulb in the house went dead. I was halfway into a call with our landlord about a power outage, when I realized that nothing in the house had gone out except the bulbs. The television still worked, and the clocks on all the kitchen devices still read the same time. Sure enough, he told me that as far as he was aware, everyone else still had power. I put down the phone, and just had to take that in for a minute. I eventually asked him to have someone come over to check a circuit board or something where a short-out could've occurred, and he agreed to send one the following day.

Apparently he came in when I was at work the next day. When I walked in, everything was fine, except the living room light blew only a second after I closed the door and turned it on. I got out my phone and called up my landlord, asking what the diagnosis was, except apparently all the circuit boards in the house were fine. The bulbs in every light fixture had blown, and were useless, but nothing in the wiring around the house was off. I got into quite the heated argument with him as I walked around the house, only for the kitchen light to blow as soon as I turned it on, too. So I had a shouting match in the dark and eventually hung up.

The light bulbs blew in the next room I went to as well, so I stopped turning them on. I eventually just settled for eating my dinner by the light of the television and chatting with Wendy over the phone to complain. Guess what also shorted out within minutes of using it? Telly went black, phone went dead.

Now I was starting to get really spooked. The phone or the telly individually could've been anything. I had already been complaining about how shitty the phone was, and the telly I could've chalked up to more maintenance problems my shitty landlord wasn't willing to fix. But both of them blacking out within seconds of each other was bizarre and unsettling.

The effect started to follow me wherever I went. Any building I went to, the lights eventually went out, which is why I'm sending this statement in through the mail. Any phone I borrow to try to contact someone blacks in seconds, except pay phones. I've been able to use those to keep in contact with Wendy, at least. Eventually, after suffering this problem at my house long enough--with a huge supply of candles that wouldn't stay lit no matter how many times I reignited them--I realized that although my microwave and even my oven had stopped working, not to mention the coffee maker, and the light in the fridge was now useless, the freezer was fine. My laptop was the most devastating loss, because that thing wasn't cheap and had a crapload of my personal effects and documents on it, and I'll admit I put my foot through the wall when I couldn't get it to power back on even on the charger. But my Airpods were fine, my electric razor still worked, and and the washing machine and dryer are fine. So, eventually, I realized that whatever I was burdened with, it was killing anything that produced light of any kind.

Electric, LED, gas lighting, the candles, even neon tubes in convenience stores--they all go out on me. I can't have light of any kind near me, which as you can imagine made writing this statement really damn difficult. As far as I know, Wendy is fine, although she has to live somewhere else because anything I affect can't be turned on again even when I'm not there.

I'm starting to get really worried. My car used to run, but I can't see anything of use on my dashboard, and my lights won't turn on, so I 've no choice but to walk unless I want officers grilling me about being a driving hazard. I'm scared to test the headlights in case the whole car stops working. After I dragged my ass to a supermarket to try and walk home with some food, I was in the store for maybe ten minutes before the entire place--lights, doors, registers, coolers--all went dark. This isn't just a 'me' problem anymore, and it's making it impossible to live my daily life.

I wish I could tell you that something especially scary has happened in the interim, but I haven't seen any ghosts or monsters at all, let alone the apparition from the school that I think must've caused this. The truth is, I've just never realized how awful life would be without any source of light whatsoever. I can't do _anything_ unless it's outside in bright daylight and good weather. I can't keep in contact with loved ones unless I use a payphone, and my car is having trouble starting. I can't eat anything that requires cooking, and I can't enjoy any form of entertainment. I can barely see to brush my teeth or use the toilet. My house is permanently dark, and there have been more outages that I think might've been my fault, even in places I wasn't physically inside of. I quit my job because I couldn't risk it happening there, and I haven't been able to pick up another one since. I can't even check my account or get money out of an ATM to get my last paycheck, so I don't know how I'm going to keep living here.

I'm scared of how this will progress even further. Will it eventually just start killing any heat or electric appliance whatsoever? What if it gets so bad that it blacks out whole counties just from me being there? If my car shuts off while I'm driving it, or someone else's shuts off...

What if someone realizes I'm doing it? I don't mean to, and I want to stop, but if I wreck someone's life just because I walked by, what if they come after me?

And...well, this is a bit embarrassing, but I'm still a little afraid of the dark. I know, I know, stupid. It's never been a huge thing, and I even like being scared when it's a horror movie (which I can't watch anymore), or campfire stories (that don't have fires anymore) or even sneaking into a school after hours (which I'm never doing again). It's just a lot more omnipresent now, you know? That little chill when you're deprived of light and you can't see anything but shadow in the corners of an open space? Where you can't help but imagine what could be behind you as you turn your back on an open space and head for the shelter of your bedroom?

There's nothing 'out there' that's going to get me, I'm sure of it. I haven't heard creaks or bumps in the night, or breathing in my ear. I'm not afraid. There's nothing hiding in the dark. I'm a grownass man, and I...well, I was going to say 'monsters aren't real'. Let's settle for 'most monsters aren't real' and 'I have nothing to fear from them'. But it still doesn't feel good.

I've started locking my bedroom door at night. I know it's selfish to ask that of her, but I wish Wendy would come back over. If I just had someone next to me, this wouldn't get to me so badly, I'm sure of it. I don't go out after sunset anymore, and I've started taking pills so I can go to sleep as soon as the light gets too low to enjoy anything. I've asked for help with rent, but it's...getting down to the wire. When the landlord throws me out, I'm not sure where I'll go, and I damn sure don't want to sleep on the streets like this. Night feels more oppressive in the midst of all this, more hostile.

Please help me. I can't keep going like this.

_Statement ends._


End file.
